


One Single Static Frame

by TheElusiveOllie



Category: BioShock, Marble Hornets
Genre: 1950s, 1960s, Ableist Language, Alternate Timeline, Alternate Universe - BioShock, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Artistic Angst, Asexual Character, Bisexual Character, Body Horror, Depression, Dissociation, Emetophobia, Entomophobia, Explicit Language, Gen, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Insect Horror, M/M, Memory Loss, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mind Control, Minor Original Character(s), POV Multiple, Panic Attacks, Paranoia, Plasmids, Platonic Relationships, Poor Life Choices, Poor Mental Health Treatment, Present Tense, Psychological Drama, Psychological Murder, Rapture (Bioshock), Rapture Civil War, Social Anxiety, Trypophobia, Untreated Mental Illness, Withdrawal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-05-04 10:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 41,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5330372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone comes to Rapture searching for an opportunity. At least, that's what they keep telling you. Four different individuals end up in the city under the sea for four different reasons. And in the end, it turns out providence doesn't care what universe they're in - and neither does the thing in their heads.</p><p>Some cosmic antipathies just can't be placated, no matter the time period.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. [ water under a bridge ]

**Author's Note:**

> Oh look it's the BioShock crossover literally no one asked for. Title comes from the Mountain Goats song "Autoclave".
> 
> So I have no excuse for this other than I couldn't get the idea out of my head so I wrote it the day after NaNo ended. So, uh, who knows where it's headed or where it'll end up. I might even take prompts. I don't know. I have no vision here and if I ever had artistic integrity it probably went out the window as soon as I wrote this.
> 
> For those that need a primer on BioShock mythology, here's the short version: in the 1940s and 50s, a wealthy Objectivist named Andrew Ryan established a city at the bottom of the North Atlantic so everyone could live in a rich happy elitist utopia, except it doesn't really work out. Oops. Hopefully that becomes fairly clear via my clunky exposition.

**FORT FROLIC - September 2, 1958**

Drinking on an empty stomach is never a good idea, particularly if you’re someone who never had a high tolerance for alcohol to begin with. Jay was always the weedy sort of guy who could get more than a little drunk by two shots, and dangerously close to blacking out by five. Not that he’d ever counted.

So why he’s currently hemorrhaging money - not to mention the feeble state of his liver - in a cocktail lounge in Fort Frolic is more or less beyond him at this point. The drinks here are, absurdly, more outrageously expensive than the norm, even for the elitist utopia of Rapture. But despite the clear lack of logic to it all, Jay’s ended up slumped in a bar stool, nursing a steadily draining glass of Arcadia Merlot. He’s wasted, he’s miserable - and so, frankly, he thinks he can say he’s earned it.

He never should’ve come here. Not just ‘here’ in the _now_ sense, but ‘here’ in the general, wider, _whole-of-Rapture_ sense. He _never_ should’ve even _thought_ \- thought that someone like _him_ could get anywhere -

But Alex had made it sound so appealing, that creative spark in his eyes as he’d jabbed a thumb over one shoulder and murmured in confidential undertone that this was an opportunity like _no other,_ a chance for them to become the creative masters they were always meant to be.

In retrospect, what was Alex thinking, approaching _him_ of all people with something like this? They weren’t friends, really. They didn’t really _know_ each other all that well. They ran in the same circles, scrapping for a living with grainy, artfully tilted photographs of empty streets and dimly-lit lamps, but neither had ever gotten that big break starving artists like them always end up hoping for.

Rapture was meant to be their new beginning. Or maybe it was just meant to be Alex’s. Gotta be one of the two, right? Can’t stay unlucky forever.

Can’t - can’t stay unlucky forever.

“What’s that?” says the bartender that Jay had forgotten existed in the interim. The abruptness of the question makes him jerk in his seat in alarm, nearly upsetting his drink. He clings to it with renewed fierceness. He’s getting his money’s worth out of this one, and somehow he doubts he’ll get a free compensatory refill.

“S’what?” says Jay. The words are already slurring treacherously. How long has he been here?

“Said somethin’ about luck,” the bartender drawls with an artfully arched brow. He keeps polishing the glass he’s been polishing for maybe the whole hour Jay’s been here as smoke crawls lazily from the end of the lit cigarette stuck in his mouth.

Jay blinks. “I did?”

Did he say something aloud?

Signs point to yes.

Jay groans and covers his face with one hand and dips forward in defeat and nearly loses his balance and almost smacks his forehead into the counter which would have resulted in a swelling purplish bruise right the hell in the center of his brow which is _not_ what he needs right now, which might be why he’s staring at the ceiling feeling sick to his gut and wondering what happened in the past five seconds to five minutes.

His head hurts.

And, uh, it belatedly strikes him that it’s completely possible that in envisioning his head denting the counter, he might have done…exactly that.

“Okay, champ,” says the bartender, and Jay hears the decisive clink of a glass being set down against a countertop. “Time to get you home.”

“M’fine,” Jay mumbles, but the next thing he knows he’s being hoisted to his feet with the sharp sting of smoke in his nostrils. He reaches halfheartedly for one of the two glasses on the counter - money’s worth, right? Isn’t that the whole Ryanist policy? - but the bartender gently smacks his hand down again.

“Not a chance,” he says, not unkindly. “I’m stoppin’ you for the night, pal. You are _done.”_

“S’money’s worth,” says Jay, managing to inject some semblance of indignity into his tone. “I just want - ”

“Yeah, I know what you want.” The bartender steers him away firmly. “Ain’t worth it. Let’s get you outta here, all right?”

Maybe the guy can recognize a lost cause when he sees one. Jay concedes with a vague mumble of dissent as he allows the bartender to drag one of his arms over his broad shoulders and help him outside of the lounge. It’s nice that the guy is so obviously beefier than Jay could ever hope to be. That way Jay’s dragging feet doesn’t slow him down.

He just slows everyone down.

“Don’t get too down on yourself, pal,” sighs the bartender. “You’re not the first guy in here to need your hand held and you won’t be the last.”

Jay blinks slowly at him but can’t muster any energy to give a shit that he’s mumbling his words aloud again.

Like this guy even knows where he _lives._ Jay’s not one of Cohen’s high-profile disciples, not even one his lesser-known sycophants like Alex. He’s just some photographer nobody with a grimy little place in Pauper’s Drop, who failed to win anyone’s approval with his allegedly ‘unique’ artistic vision. Some artistic vision that turned out to be. It got him as far as an underwater city for creative minds and visionaries - as long as they’re the kind of visionaries with more talent than him.

“Really gotta thing for this Alex guy, huh?” says the bartender.

Jay has to coordinate his head in relation to his neck in order to look at the guy with an adequately weary expression.

“S’there like - ” He spins a finger in a sloppy, equivocal circle - “s’m kinda mind-reading plasmid out there or - or something?”

“Nah.” The bartender grins, swift and crooked. “You’re not the first kid to lose your filter when you’re as plastered as you are, buddy.”

Jay sags.

“Yeah,” he says, sighing. Sounds about right.

The bartender laughs, a short, harsh bark of mirth. “Buck up, buddy. You’re in Rapture.”

“Yeah,” says Jay listlessly. “Rapture.”

The big dream. The big break. Maybe he’d been naive in thinking that he could forge ahead in something like this, like pictures snapped in an underwater city would receive any warmer a public reception than ones taken on the surface. The change hadn’t been great. It hadn’t even been promising. Turns out the big selling point of Rapture was that it _was_ built for the best, the brightest, the genius poets and the brilliant artisans, but with that much smaller and more condensed a pool for creativity and such escalating standards, what chance did a working-class nobody have in the face of everything, _really._ Andrew Ryan established his whole rich-people utopia out of a sense of pride, so that the glorified top one percent of humanity could lord their superiority over everyone else. Maybe he’d failed to recognize that in a system like this there wasn’t always going to _be_ a top one percent without there being a bottom fifty to elevate it - or maybe he simply didn’t care.

Actually, yeah, now that he thinks about it, knowing what he does about Ryan from the tabloids and radio announcements, the latter seems far more likely.

“Where you live, then?” says the bartender.

“Y’should get back,” is Jay’s only reply, inclining his head in the vague direction of the deserted cocktail lounge. “I’ll find my way - ”

“I’ll get you to the bathysphere station, how ‘bout that?” The bartender cuts across him neatly, with practiced efficiency. “D’you need me to repeat myself? I _said_ you’re not the first I’ve had to - ”

“Yeah,” Jay sighs. “Okay.”

At this point, arguing is just damaging what little credibility he still has. So he surrenders to the guy as he guides him to the bathysphere station, even lets him help him into one of the velvet-swathed seats.

“You gonna be okay there?” he asks, one hand on the little globular sub’s open hatch.

Jay nods tiredly. The itch of sleep is beginning to burn beneath his eyes in the wake of the outrageous amounts of alcohol he’s just splashed into his system. Hopefully he won’t nod off during the ride home.

The bartender chews on his lower lip for a minute before nodding to himself, apparently satisfied, and stepping back to let Jay tug the hatch closed. He watches the slope of the bigger man’s back retreat through the circular pane of fogging glass for a long minute, noting the clicking of his fingers and the spark that leaps up between them as he relights his cigarette, before turning to the navigation lever and pulling it to the corresponding destination with a satisfying _chunk_ of locking bolts and pins.

Then he sinks back against the soft scratchiness of the seat and listens to the rush of bubbles as the bathysphere submerges and begins making its winding path along the metal lines. His fingers tap an uneven tattoo against his leg as he struggles to remember the strains of whatever quiet jazz tune had been pealing from the jukebox parked in the corner. It’s a lost cause. He doesn’t have the ear for music. Never did.

He’d always been the kinda guy to hide behind the lens, the wide blink of a photograph. He could appreciate the subtlty in framing something in just the right way, plucking a moment from the daily assortment to keep preserved in sepia-toned stillness. Alex had been considerably more versatile in his talents or maybe simply his eagerness to try, and maybe that’s how he’d fallen in with Sander Cohen and his artist’s collective. Maybe there just hadn’t been a place in their ranks for a man like Jay, someone who always had to be the man behind the camera and never the one in front of it. Once Alex had hit that veritable jackpot, so to speak, he’d made no attempts to reach out to Jay again. He’d just - disappeared, absorbed within Cohen’s collection of prized stooges willing to stoke the man’s ego in exchange for celebrity traction and public poise. Jay’s fairly sure he’d glimpsed the familiar name imprinted at the bottom of the posters advertising Cohen’s latest and greatest - the proud moniker of _KRALIE_ stamped in fine print just beneath the sprawling, overly-elaborate inking of _SANDER COHEN PRESENTS_.

Jay’s head lolls against the back of the bathysphere’s seat. This is what drove him to drink, he remembers now. Because he couldn’t bear to sit alone with his thoughts, with that thick, glistening bitterness boiling in his gut. He can practically taste it now, hot and sick on the back of his tongue.

No - wait. He can _definitely_ taste it.

Wait, shit shit shit shit no that’s not bitterness that’s definitely _definitely_ oh god -

Jay staggers out of the bathysphere with his eyes screwed shut and his nose flaring against the reek of his own sick spattered over what used to be some fine red velvet.

All he can do is grimly hope there aren’t any security cameras around. He _really_ doesn’t wanna be charged for this.

No, all he really wants to do is sleep and not wake up with a raging hangover.

Knowing him, he’s not likely to get either of his wishes tonight. Especially since his first goal was to _not get sick._

 

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**PAUPER'S DROP - September 3, 1958**

The bell on the pawn shop’s door tingles with a ferocity that makes Jay’s temples throb, and he can’t suppress the wince that makes his shoulders leap up to his ears. He’d managed to luck out in getting to work mere minutes before his boss, the singular guy who owns and manages the damn place, but there wasn’t much to do about the bloodshot straggles of veins inflaming the whites of his eyes or the gray-purple crescents printed beneath. He’d desperately tried to down some of the grainy coffee he’d rattled out to wake himself up, but the grounds got caught in his throat and nearly made him choke. And, in all honesty, after an indeterminate amount of time crashed out on his thin little cot, there was only so much he could do to rid himself of the hangdog giveaway of his less-than-reputable poor life choices.

“Long night?” drawls Espinoza as he lets the door swing shut, taking entirely too much satisfaction out of Jay’s subsequent flinch. His boss whistles once between his teeth and shakes his head. “Jesus, Merrick. You look like shit.”

“Thanks,” says Jay, trying for dry but not quite getting there. “I know. I looked in the mirror.”

“You sorry son of a bitch.” Espinoza merely sounds amused as he steps back behind the counter. “How the hell’d you get yourself to work ‘fore me?”

Jay manages a rueful smile between cracked lips. “You’re always late.”

“Touché.” The other man yawns as he winds his way behind the counter booth with an edition of this morning’s Rapture Tribune pinned between elbow and hip. He drags a chair up and kicks his feet onto the counter’s surface, snapping the paper open so he can begin to read.

Jay closes his eyes, momentarily furious at himself for failing to appropriate the store’s single chair for himself when he first got here. Hank Espinoza: owner of the King Pawn, both the sole employer and only other employee, and the only person Jay knows who manages to swing so regularly from genuine friend to absolute pain in the ass.

Then again, it’s not like Jay knows a lot of people. He’s have to get out more and have an actual social life to make that happen. And know more than a grand total of two people, one of whom seems to have forgotten someone like Jay ever existed.

No, he’s not bitter. Why would anyone think that?

“So.” Hank turns the page of the Tribune, perusing the articles inside without much interest. “What’s got you down, then?”

“What do you _think?”_ Jay digs his index and middle fingers into his aching temples as he leans forward and braces an elbow against the countertop.

“Still haven’t caught your big break?”

“Not going to _ever,_ it seems like.”

Espinoza merely shakes his head, vaguely sympathetic. “It’ll happen one of these days.”

“Yeah, cause Rapture’s just the city of opportunity,” Jay snorts. “How’d they pitch this to people like us, huh?”

“It’s people like us that keep the wheels of Rapture turnin’,” says Hank. “Those high-brow artists can pretend they’re the saving grace all they like. They wouldn’t be a thing without us.”

Jay silently thinks that he’ll remember that next time Cohen flaunts his newest magnum opus while people like Espinoza are still stuck in the Drop, running a business out of pocket when down-on-their-luck hopefuls come sniffing into King Pawn with stolen earrings, breathless and desperate as they try to insist that they’re antiques, real gold, real gold, they _swear!_

He can keep putting forth his works in Dionysus Park whenever Lamb hosts her free exhibitions, but they’ll keep getting glanced over, passed over, ignored in favor of the taller and the flashier and the ones who can afford to make their works look _good_ in comparison.

There’s no ‘if’ about it. Coming to Rapture was a mistake. It just happens to be one Jay doesn’t quite know how to fix. He has a feeling even a worthless nobody like him might attract attention by trying to flee to the surface.

So Jay says nothing. He drums his fingers along the countertop and glances over his shoulder into the store area as he waits for a few of those hopefuls to start trickling in.

It’s not like he’s got anything else in his life waiting to happen.


	2. [ freeze ]

**ARCADIA - September 3, 1958**

“You’re _kidding.”_

“Wish I was, sweetheart.”

“Cut it out, Rubert. Seriously? _Another_ one?”

“Look, you got an issue with how this place is built, you can take it up with Mr. Ryan, y’hear?”

“Yeah.” A drawn-out, weary sigh. “I hear you.”

Jessica pushes a stray lock of hair behind her ear as she hunkers down to inspect the latest leak in Rapture’s allegedly impenetrable walls. When she fought tooth and nail to get herself into the best engineering classes her meager little funds could buy, this isn’t exactly where she’d planned on ending up: fixing the pipes of an underwater city that, while ingenious in its initial design, had so many flaws in its inherent construction that she was frankly appalled the damn thing was still standing.

She runs thick-gloved hands over the crack where the hiss of salt water has begun to tickle the opposite side of the thick glass corridor that comprises the stairway to Langford’s laboratory. Of course Langford wasn’t the one to call it in. Jessica would be surprised if the woman could tear herself away from her work for longer than five minutes to take notice of the leak in the _first_ damn place. Not that she can’t relate to that, it’s just when it comes down to something so clearly necessary like _not drowning_ or flooding the entirety of Arcadia, it seems like something of a _massive_ oversight.

She sighs, shaking her head wearily, and starts pulling the necessary tools from her colleague’s canvas bag. It calls for a simple patch job, nothing more, but it’d be nice if she could spend her day - or night, rather, now that she’s been placed on overtime for the sake of fixing this last leaking problem in Arcadia - working down in Hephaestus like she’d planned. The blazing core beating-heart of Rapture was the object of her eternal, fascinated wonder, not simply in its design but in how it managed to keep the entire city running, utilizing the heat boiling from the ocean floor for its own purposes. The rumors and whispers had said Mr. Ryan was more than just a damn talented electrical engineer - allegedly, he was one of the _best._ Whether that had to do with his ability or simply the man’s own overblown ego isn’t entirely clear, though Jessica’s willing to bet money on the latter.

She came down here to forge _(pardon the pun)_ a brand new life for herself, not spend her every waking moment and resource in making sure that rich people could wile away their lives in contented luxury.

Tongue between her teeth, Jessica applies the rest of the solvent that should keep the makeshift patch in place until one of the higher-ups can get one of those lumbering prototypes down here to weld the whole thing shut. She doesn’t like the look of those things any more than she likes the idea of them getting free rein of Rapture, but it’s not like she’s ever going to be the one benefitting from the system that’ll be keeping them in place. That’s not for her. Never was.

“All right, Rubert,” she says tiredly as she braces a hand against the glass to push herself to her feet. “We’re done here.”

“Goddamn.” Rubert whistles, plainly impressed. “Dunno how you do it, Locke.”

“By working real hard and believing in myself,” she deadpans. “What’s next?”

Rubert consults the long list of names and locations that constitute Rapture’s days of damage reports.

“Medical,” he says. “Looks like Steinman forgot to heat the pipes again.”

Jessica doesn’t have words. She closes her eyes for a long moment as she takes in the full extent of the doctor’s alleged ‘genius’ (read: utter _idiocy)_ then exhales, long and slow.

“Great,” she says tonelessly.

It’s kind of breathtaking, how _little_ it seems that any brain cells whatsoever go into remembering to do the bare minimum in operating this place. They can’t keep relegating all the maintenance work to the working-class unfortunates, except they do. And they’ll get away with it. They’ll keep getting away with it. It grates.

This isn’t how it was supposed to go.

She follows her colleague out through the verdant maze of trees and winding creeks of Arcadia. The morning is still breaking, but there are already a few people lining up to cash in their tickets to the Tea Gardens or the Grotto and relive their memories of the surface they agreed to leave far behind. The trees aren’t the kinds that stick in her head like cobwebs and moth-balls - spindly black bones jutting out from the earth to scratch the steel-gray sky. These trees are genetically engineered perfect specimens, all copyright to Andrew Ryan, with thick full leaves and rich clusters of fruit bending each branch.

It doesn’t make her any less eager to get away and flee into Rapture’s bleak little waterlogged corners of industry and art deco hell. Something about the vague echoes of skeleton branches cutting through the crisp-cold air makes her skin prickle. There’s nothing out there watching her between the scattered clumps of flowers and draping leaves, nothing that peels away from between the vertical streaks of trunks to flit behind her, but the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end all the same.

There are some things you just can’t shake.

“Arcadia,” sighs Rubert wistfully. “Always a jewel.”

Jessica says nothing. Disagreeing would raise too many questions.

“Always think about comin’ back here some night,” Rubert says companionably. “Save up for a night at the Glens, y’know.”

She braces herself for the inevitable question as to whether she’d want to join him, or if she ever fancies doing the same, but it never comes. She doesn’t have a reply for him.

Arcadia can keep being Rapture’s verdurous dream. As long as Jessica isn’t obligated to visit it outside of work, she can’t particularly find it in herself to care. She knows full well she’s not anyone’s favorite on the maintenance staff, let alone Giovanni Rubert, considering the poor man has to work with her day after day. Maybe he’s just too old to give a damn anymore, the little hair left clinging to his scalp gone white and wispy like candyfloss. Having to constantly fight to prove her intellect, and prove it and prove it and prove it again, put her on the defensive from day one. Maybe some of her colleagues had looked on her with something approaching a surface-level fondness, but that was before they realized she looked over her shoulder with every other step and never took the same route to work two days in a row and refused to disclose her home location to anyone on staff, even their employer.

They can speculate however much they like. Her paranoia’s well justified. She doesn’t need anyone judging her for that.

 

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**MEDICAL PAVILION - September 3, 1958**

Rapture has blinked itself fully awake by the time they reach the Medical Pavilion and kneel on the checkered floors outside the entrance to the slew of dental service buildings. Jessica pops open the panel that exposes the metal and copper innards running underneath the area’s floor and shakes her head in disgust at the sight. A thin white crust has begun to coat the pipes’ bronze and silver casts, a delicate filigree of ice cobwebbing down every visible surface.

“Christ,” says Rubert as he passes a hand over his lack of hair. “These things’re really frozen stiff. What’d Steinman do to ‘em, stick ‘em in a meat locker?”

“I think Steinman’s a little too preoccupied with _the goddess_ to care about frozen pipes,” Jessica says dryly. Rubert rolls his eyes.

“Goddamn lunatic,” he says warmly. “One of these days he’s gonna slip up, and where’ll he be?”

Jessica shrugs a shoulder. “Far away from here, if there’s any justice in the world.”

Rubert scowls. “C’mon, girl. Steinman’s a genius.”

“Never said he wasn’t. But he’s also out of his _mind.”_

Rubert offers her his snaggletoothed grin. “Well. Never said he wasn’t _that_ either.”

Jessica bites back an amused snort.

Pleased, Rubert’s grin widens for a minute before he returns his attention to the pipes in question.

“Don’t suppose you got one’a those plasmid things?” he says finally. “What’s it they say? Fire at your fingertips?”

Jessica shakes her head wordlessly. She’s seen the advertisements plastered all over Rapture, boasting advancements to the human nucleotide chain unlike anything else the people down here could have dreamed of. These things are practically hopping off the shelves, or would be if they were sold in shelves. But really, the whole nexus of the business is what gives her pause. The purported geniuses of Fontaine Futuristics have yet to explain at any length what ADAM is, and what kind of things a miracle drug like that can do.

In her experience, miracle drugs don’t come cheap, and they definitely don’t come without serious side effects.

Well, that, and she’s not overly inclined to trust a guy who’d install ammo vending machines and gun upgrade stations and call it all an endeavor for ‘peace’.

“Pity.” Rubert chews on his lower lip contemplatively before he blows out a long-suffering sigh. “Well, guess we gotta do this the hard way.”

Rubert gets to work in the cramped little space despite Jessica’s offers to be the one to do most of the heavy lifting, so she has little to do but wait for him to call for the tools he wants at his disposal and hand them over. She’s glad he can’t see the roll of her eyes at his insistence to be the one to do the brunt of the work, in no mood for any projected engineering machismo. At least it means she doesn’t have to get on her back and squirm into a tight space full of frozen pipes to do some serious thawing. Given how much of a gangly stick Rubert is, it’s probably fair to say he’s smaller than she is, and probably more suited to the task.

_“You’re serious?”_

Jessica glances in the direction of the escalating voice despite herself. It sounds aghast, and an awful lot like it’s coming from the aesthetics wing.

“C’mon.” And also masculine. “You can’t tell me something like that would cost - ”

Jessica sags back against the wall, snapping back to utter disinterest. Money squabbles. That’s what fills up ninety-percent of the air these days. What did people expect, with a totally free, completely privatized market with no economic control whatsoever?

The hoarse bout of coughing makes her jump. Pretty soon the unlucky guy comes hobbling downstairs, hacking into one of his fists with his shoulders hunched miserably around himself.

“Are you okay?”

The guy looks up, apparently startled to find anyone else here. He recovers admirably and shakes his head.

“Uh - yeah,” he says. “‘M fine.”

That probably sounded more convincing in his head, when it wasn’t followed up by another awful, jagged-sounding cough.

“You don’t _sound_ very okay,” says Jessica with a skeptical lift of her brows.

“I’m fine,” he says firmly. “I get sick sometimes.”

“Doctors won’t give you the right medication?” She leans against the wall and pretends the frigid temperature of the pipes inside doesn’t chill her to the bone.

“Guess they’re saying it’s not really their problem.” His shoulders twitch in a half-hearted, helpless shrug. “The market’s changing. Just fix everything up with ADAM, and that’ll make it all better.” He digs a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lights one up - with a match, Jessica can’t help but notice idly, not with a tongue of flame sprung from his fingertips. “And just what was I thinking, trying to get medical help from a Medical Pavilion?”

Jessica inclines her head with a wry smirk. “Should’ve known better.”

“Silly of me.” The guy shakes his head.

The vague conversation dwindles into silence. Not one for extended discussion, is he?

She looks down at Rubert’s skinny legs poking out from the wall hatch, shrugs, and pushes herself off the ground to hold out a hand. “Jessica.”

He regards the extended hand like it’s a particularly perplexing foreign object before accepting it. His fingers are unexpectedly cold but his grip is solid and firm as he shakes, once.

“Tim.”

“Been here long?”

Tim snorts, a soft, skeptical exhalation. “Long enough.” He tips his pack of cigarettes in her direction but she shakes her head.

Yeah. She doesn’t need to pry further. She feels that.

She opens a hand, wiggling her fingers scornfully as one side of her mouth twists downward in dry revulsion. “Rapture, huh.”

“Rapture,” Tim agrees.

“Opportunity awaits.”

Tim makes a vaguely amused noise that could be interpreted as a laugh. She smiles faintly. Yeah, he gets it. She can tell.

_“Locke!”_

Ohhhh -

Shit.

She darts Tim an apologetic look and a shrug before retreating to Rubert’s call and dropping onto her knees beside him. Rubert looks at her incredulously, his face flushed with either exhaustion or the cold.

“You wander off on me?”

“Sorry,” she says. “Got sidetracked.”

Rubert’s eyes bulge with momentary astonishment.

“Sidetracked? _You?”_

She doesn’t have to explain herself to him, so she just shakes her head and glances back to see if her newest acquaintance might still be lingering in the corner of her eye.

When she looks back, Tim is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why is Jessica an engineer? Short answer - because she’s Jessica goddamn Locke
> 
> Long answer - because I want a lady engineer so I’m goddamn well gonna have a lady engineer fuck historical accuracy if you want historical accuracy why are you reading fanfiction about rewriting genetic codes so you can shoot lightning from your fingers


	3. [ sweat and smoke ]

**FORT FROLIC - September 5, 1958**

It’s the bright, throbbing ache pulsing behind his eyes that rouses him. Alex breathes in sharply, and the air stings dryly in the back of his throat.

Last night? Mostly a blur. The most recent hours leading up to now? Also a blur. Maybe less of a blur?

Alcohol searing a long dark trail in the back of his throat. The cold pinch of a needle, the press of a plunger and the unholy burn of a plasmid shot straight into his bloodstream. God but he can still taste it. The lingering hiss of power sparking at his fingertips. The best high imaginable. The feel of the ADAM coursing right to his heart.

And after - ?

Bile creeps up the back of his throat. No, okay. He snaps himself out of the live picture show down last night’s memory lane. He’ll think about that later.

Already the echoes of voices downstairs are starting to drift through the floor. The Fort’s waking up, and soon he’ll have to join the throng. Cohen will want him at his beck and call today, he’s certain of it. When does the man ever not?

His stomach can’t seem to decide if it’s hungry or violently ill, and he’s in no hurry to find out. He needs to get up, he needs to get some water down, and he needs to figure out how long he’s been out of it. Alex groans, fingers fisting into the tangle of sheets that have managed to knot themselves around his hips and legs in some kind of stunning abstract geometry that he might have, were this any other day, considered worthy of artistic contemplation.

His foot connects with something hard that rolls off the bed and clunks dully to the floor. Alex cracks open one eye a slit, wincing at the sharp bite of light against his retinas. The lime green bottle is unmistakeable.

Moonbeam Absinthe. Figures. It must’ve been a hell of a showcase last night if Sander had started breaking that delicacy out. And lucky Alex, he must’ve scored a whole bottle, probably at the expense of most of the cash in his wallet. One bottle all to himself - no wonder he feels like such complete and utter shit.

Alex manages to extricate himself from the sheets and rolls over with every intention of rummaging around in search of his clothes, and maybe a radio or two with a recording that could shed some light onto the situation.

He stiffens in alarm when his fingers brush bare skin. It takes him a minute to remember before his face relaxes into a scowl.

“Get outta here, Fitzpatrick.”

“Really?” Fitzpatrick opens an eye to regard Alex lazily. Still drunk, or just too hungover to care? Probably both, knowing him. Alex clenches his jaw, silently fuming. “It was ‘Kyle’ last night.”

“I was wasted last night.”

“Hmm.” Fitzpatrick seems to debate this internally for a minute before nodding his agreement. “You were.” One corner of his mouth quirks upward faintly. “So was I. It was nice.”

Alex groans and sinks his face into his hands.

“Amy’s gonna kill me,” he mumbles, the words muffled through his fingers.

There’s the soft squeak of bedsprings as Fitzpatrick shifts closer.

“She’s never complained before.”

Alex drops his hands and glares at the opposite wall.

For the love of -

He immediately tears away from the incipient contact and rises to collect his clothes from the floor, even though stooping to rescue his pair of boxers from under the bed frame makes the pounding in his head increase tenfold in pain and pressure. He grits his teeth against the thud of blood in his brain and swiftly fetches his boxers out to tug them on.

And Kyle just keeps reclining peacefully on the bed - _Alex’s_ bed, he’s beginning to realize as the previous night’s events start to trickle back, Kyle’s pianist fingers tracing the lines of his collarbone - with no intention of listening to his off-again-on-again colleague.

“This is the last time,” growls Alex, and where are his goddamn _trousers_ and what did they even _do_ last night? He’s getting vague sputters of memory - he and Kyle had gotten drunk, _extremely_ so, and Sander’s showcase had grown extravagant like they always do, and at some point he had sequestered himself and Kyle away in his room at Cameron Suites.

“Sure,” says Fitzpatrick, stretching languidly like some kind of insufferable cat. “Just like last time was the last time. And the last time. And the last time…” He trails off with a meaningful lift of his eyebrows.

“Oh my god,” growls Alex, “shut up.”

“Look, Kralie.” Fitzpatrick’s voice sharpens to its more businesslike stiffness. “You’re new here - relatively, anyway, so let me give you a little friendly advice: don’t take it personally.”

Alex pauses midway through trying to smooth the creases in his wrinkled dress shirt - that one’s going to languish in the back of his closet for a few months until he remembers it and pays an outrageous fee to get it pressed - to narrow his eyes at the other man, torn between frustration and curiosity.

Kyle opens a hand with a faint, indulgent smile. “Given what you know about Cohen, is it really a surprise?”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, brow creasing faintly.

“Don’t make me say it aloud,” sighs Fitzpatrick. He straightens up a little more securely. “All right. Look. You repeat any of this, I’ll deny it. You get that?”

All of Kyle’s cajoling and faintly carefree nature aside, his disposition has become deadly serious. Alex hesitates before nodding. The implication of what might happen if he were to say it within Cohen’s earshot is patently obvious.

“How much of Cohen’s _influence,_ do you think,” says Kyle, “has to do with _talent?”_

“He’s a genius,” Alex says slowly. Fitzpatrick rolls his eyes.

“He’s a psychopath.” The other man’s tone is frank. “His work’s no better.”

“It’s avant garde.”

“It’s shit.” Fitzpatrick’s lip curls into a sneer, tinged with enough of a smile to be interpreted, vaguely, as something of a joke. “And no one’ll say so. Wanna know why?” His tone adapts an odd intensity. Alex has difficulty meeting the other man’s gaze. “‘Cause anyone who says it gets a gun to their head, and that’s if they’re lucky. Where d’you think Cohen gets his guinea pig dancers from, hmm?”

Alex never devoted undue thought to the origins of the luckless bastards who get trussed up with wires that will administer electric shocks should they not be ‘experiencing’ the rhythm adequately to suit Cohen’s whims. He’d never been naive enough to assume they were volunteers - even the most zealous of Cohen’s disciples wouldn’t subject themselves to that - but he hadn’t considered the fact that they might be outright opposers to Cohen and his artistic ideology.

Fitzpatrick would know, wouldn’t he, being Cohen’s choice pianist in every respect, and always the one to play the tunes to which the unfortunate conscripted dancers would dance.

He can’t say that _wouldn’t_ sound like something beyond the realm of possibility, knowing Sander Cohen and his outlook toward the perceived ‘doubters’ of his work.

Alex crosses his arms over his chest. “So why’re _you_ with him?”

Fitzpatrick spreads his arms in an exaggerated shrug.

“Who else is gonna pay my rent? Besides.” He slides off the edge of the bed and starts echoing Alex’s earlier motions as he tracks down his various articles of clothing with a markedly languorous air. “I won’t pretend the fame isn’t worth the lie.”

He looks at Alex with almost a pitying smile, one eyebrow gliding up smoothly.

“Why’d _you_ fall in with us ‘disciples’?”

Alex doesn’t have an answer, not in the wake of that. He jerks a fresh shirt from his open closet and starts buttoning it, turning around so he can staunchly ignore Fitzpatrick’s excruciatingly deliberate exploration of every inch of his room as he starts to assemble his wardrobe slowly, the absolute pinnacle of unconcern.

Fingers creep over one of his shoulders, sliding under the collar of his shirt, and he shivers at the surprisingly cold touch.

“Don’t worry,” says Fitzpatrick quietly. “I won’t leave you in the wind. We disciples have to stick together.”

His fingers tighten incrementally, not enough to dig into the skin but fiercely and suddenly enough to make Alex go rigid, his breath catching in his throat.

“But if any word of this conversation leaves this room?” The threat is nearly silent but for the bite of the consonants. “I’ll know it.”

Alex half-turns in swelling indignation, but Fitzpatrick is already halfway out the door.

 

 

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**FORT FROLIC - September 5, 1958**

Fitzpatrick’s words stay with him for the rest of the day, like an itch he can’t scratch, persistent as the memory of fingers trailing down the line of his spine and tingling his arms with goosebumps. He can’t remember if he’d invited Amy to the showcase. He must have, and in any case, he’d called her place in Olympus Heights and gotten no response.

He’s still less than inclined to scour the contours of his memories of last night any more thoroughly than before. As uneasy as the idea makes him, he resolves to leave things where they are.

By midday, the tickling of air skittering over his skin has escalated into out-and-out shivering.

“No, no, _no!”_

Alex’s hand jerks. The spool of film slips from his nerveless fingers and goes rolling across the floor.

“With emotion!” Cohen raves at his handful of incompetent actors with chironomic outrage, his disapproval sharply evident in the fierceness of every gesture. “With _emotion!_ This is a piece about _betrayal._ Fractured trust. Sin, agony! _Where,_ then, is the _agony?”_

Alex flinches as though he’s the one being actively berated. He hastily drops onto his hands and knees to retrieve the wayward roll of film before it risks getting crushed underfoot. He glimpses Fitzpatrick, chin propped beneath his hand as he leans against his piano, popping his jaw in a wide yawn as he watches the spectacle with relative disinterest. The other man's been studiously avoiding him all day, pointedly making no mention of whatever took place the night prior.

He returns to his camera and waits for the scene to resume after Cohen decides he’s done tearing his actors a new one. He’s meant to be taking production and promotional stills, but somehow he doubts that Cohen wants to be the one front and center. Actually, scratch that, he’s completely certain Cohen _does,_ but he’ll want the lighting and direction to be perfectly staged, not snapped on the sly by an amateur.

Alex runs fingers through his hair, startled when they come away damp with cold sweat. He half-expects his breath to be coming out in icy puffs. Why is he so goddamn _cold?_

The hairs on the nape of his neck prickle. He shoots a nervous glance over his shoulder, scanning the assembled crew of Sander Cohen’s latest production. They all seem bored or scared or nervous - nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary. So why does he feel like he’s being -

\- watched?

Cohen’s tantrum doesn’t look to be letting up anytime soon, so Alex takes his premature leave. He can’t work like this. Cohen wouldn’t want him to be working like this.

Something’s wrong.

Not just _wrong,_ it’s - there’s something he can’t place. That sense of unease has graduated into a fear of some nameless, depthless, faceless impending doom he can’t put a name to.

It’s not until his veins start to light up with that awful, indescribable burn that he realizes. He has to hunt down the nearest Circus of Values, flinching at how that awful tin-rattle laughter clangs about in his skull and rings against the delicate parts of his ears, and fork over an appalling amount of money so it can dispense an EVE hypo with a promising _clunk._

Alex doesn’t wait. Right in front of the vending machine, he rolls up his sleeve and jams the needle into his wrist, depressing the plunger with a soft, satisfied hiss of relief. The bright pulse of EVE shooting from vial to vein flares bright blue before it resolves into the same reddish tint as the blood pumping through his veins, no longer dry and hungry for ADAM.

He wriggles his fingers to let the supplement work its way into his system, but that refreshing hot lick of power to his nerves is all his body needs to know the injection is working.

The chills are still there. The infrequent paranoid impulses don’t fade. But they will, he knows it. In the festivities the night before, he must’ve missed an injection of EVE. It could’ve happened to anyone. The withdrawals are fierce, but he was able to preempt them. It was just the ADAM. It was just the plasmids. That’s all.

Nothing else to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes this is one of the first times I wrote some non-ace things of my own volition are you proud
> 
> is this even remotely IC I don't know how allo things are supposed to work


	4. [ the pale hand ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to note that the ending portion of this chapter may be unsettling to some, as it details a severe mental breakdown and deals heavily in dissociation and disturbing gruesome imagery.

**PAUPER’S DROP - September 5th, 1958**

“Uh. Guy? Hey, guy.”

Something nudges him in his ribs, which he didn’t realize were sore until just now.

“Are you, uh, planning on - on getting up, or - ?”

The ground against his back is wet and icy. A chill shivers up his spine.

“Oh, shit. He’s gotta be - he can’t be _dead,_ can he? I - fuck, I am so _fired - ”_

The voice rescinds into the background sounds of Rapture, frantic mumbling drifting in and out of Tim’s direct line of hearing. The stiff muscles in his face screw up in a wince as he strains to raise, plants both palms against the ground and tries to muster some kind energy to push himself upright. His arms tremble with the effort.

A cursory twitch of each of his extremities at least confirms that nothing’s broken. Nothing he needs, anyway. His head’s sore and throbbing, but that’s nothing new. He flexes his shoulders experimentally. Nothing outside of the standard soreness that comes from his late-night somnambulist escapades.

God, but not _again._

(He doesn’t dare reevaluate how he came to accept that this would be the _norm_ for him.)

“Oh - god, hey - ”

Oh good, Mumbling Guy is back. Because he was so useful before. He blinks owlishly at Tim as he leans anxiously over, eyebrows raised in alarm.

Where is he, the Drop? He’s never left it before. He feels like he knows these streets and alleys back to front, the number of times he’s had to claw his way out of garbage heaps and backways before the city has even woken up properly. With any luck, this guy’ll just assume he had a rough night like anyone else in the Drop, and they can go on their separate merry ways.

There’s always the hope Tim will be forgettable enough to not even warrant a second look, but looks like he was unlucky to land himself with a Good Samaritan this go around.

Tim grunts as he manages to roll onto his side, levering himself up with his left forearm braced against the ground since that one is marginally _less_ bruised than his right.

“Wh - uh, are you - you’re okay, um, right?”

“No,” says Tim, practically hissing the word through clenched teeth.

“Um, no?”

“No.”

He makes it to his knees, and that’s when his unwanted spectator finally decides to step in. A hand slips under one of his elbows and he jerks subtly away from the contact.

“Don’t - ”

“Sorry,” the other man says hastily. “I didn’t mean - ”

“I’m fine,” says Tim. Maybe not wholly convincingly, but he doesn’t need to be convincing. He just needs to get on his feet long enough for this guy to stop acting like his help is wanted or needed. Arm’s length. Distance. It’s just - safer. 

He shoots his unbidden rescuer a look that lands somewhere between suspicion and apology. “Just, uh - got drunk. Last night. Must’ve - passed out.”

“Uh-huh,” says the guy, eyeing Tim warily. “Which s’why you don’t smell like alcohol, right?”

Goddamnit.

Tim just woke up wet and muddy and sore on someone’s doorstep. He doesn’t find himself in a mood to humor the guy’s inner detective. “How about we just agree that I did, okay?”

“You woke up in front of my _work,”_ says the other man slowly. “I thought you were _dead_ or something. You _looked_ it.”

Tim kinda _feels_ it, yeah. Pale, trembling, soaked and chilled to the bone. He combs fingers through his hair and finds it clotted with mud and something dark and sticky that looks uncomfortably like blood. _His_ blood? Better than the alternative.

He’d wipe his hand on his shirt or something, but it’s stained enough, and besides. It’s not like he’s got a whole lot of shirts.

“Look,” says Tim, grinding the words out with frustrated precision, “I’ve had kind of a long night. I’m just gonna go home. Okay?”

“Well, uh - ”

The guy stops and chews on his lower lip for a minute, a frown dimpling his forehead.

“I just mean, like - if you needed me to call a doctor or something - ”

“What for?” Tim snorts, his tone derisive. “I look like I need some ‘cosmetic improvements’?”

“What?” And now he looks confused again. Hasn’t gotten the memo yet?

Tim sighs. “Never mind. I’m just gonna - yeah.”

He turns and starts stumping away. Every step sends an aftershock drilling up the length of his spine, and he clenches his teeth. A quick glance over his shoulder assures him that he’s outside the King Pawn place. And now he knows to never come back here, now that one of the employees is still staring at him in confused concern.

“I just - wanted to know,” he says abruptly, “if, um, if you needed, like - a change of clothes, or something. You just seem pretty, uh, you know.”

He gestures loosely in Tim’s general direction. Tim regards him skeptically.

“I don’t have any money,” he says. That’s a lie, but a simple one. He probably really _doesn’t_ have enough for the kind of stuff King Pawn has to offer.

“You don’t need - I mean, I just think, like, y’know - ” He shrugs, the movement stiff and awkward. “Like, uh, a loan, kind of.”

Tim isn’t really sure what to say to that.

The guy is pretty much a stick, and a fragile-looking one at that, particularly in contrast to Tim - stocky, bulky, broad-shouldered Tim.

“We have other clothes,” he says. “Um, inside. I mean. I’m Jay. I work here.”

Christ, is this guy always this painfully socially inept? How does he make buying stuff from a pawn shop sound appealing when he can barely get a word out? How did he even get _hired_ in the first damn place?

“I’m good,” says Tim, tiredly. “Really. But, uh, thanks. I guess.”

“You sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“Yeah.” 

No.

But it doesn’t really matter.

He starts the long walk back home, struggling not to limp, all the while feeling the burn of Jay’s stare boring into his back

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**NEPTUNE’S BOUNTY - September 8, 1958**

He’ll take whatever work he can get, really, as long as it isn’t anywhere in the vicinity of Frank Fontaine. That man’s name is starting to sound like a kind of bizarre curse, and the whispers and rumors that stalked his every move are all the indications Tim needs to know he should steer clear. Yeah, scaling the business ladder, good for him. He can have at his genetic enhancement and plasmids and biological phenomenons. When he learns to fix someone like Tim, maybe then he’ll be worth listening to.

The sad fact of the matter is that Rapture - and the world in general, if Tim’s honest with himself, a feat in and of itself - simply wasn’t built for people like him. The Medical Pavilion boasts cosmetic alterations in lieu of any sort of treatment for the fizzes and crackles of static eating away at Tim’s brain. Scalpels only cut skin deep, and his problems are buried into every arc of every neuron.

So, yeah. He can’t help but a little bitter toward the man who’s making such a proud name for himself. Fontaine Futuristics. Some future. Some opportunity.

He can’t say he’s made a lot of friends in Rapture. The woman he’d run into down at Medical, the engineer with a rueful cynicism to match his own, had been one of the first people he’s spoken to outside of work. She’d sympathized with his frustrations without a scrap of righteous pity, and he’d liked her. Even more unbelievably, he’d liked her enough to not go out of his way to seek her out again. He’s not in the habit of inflicting himself on people who don’t deserve it. It gets him a reputation at his job in Port Neptune, but that can’t really be helped, and no one cares about him enough to poke or prod or ask questions.

Once he got used to the smell of fish that clings to his nostrils and his clothes and his skin no matter how much he tries to scrub it out, working at the fisheries wasn’t so bad. There’s always a room for him at the McDonagh’s when he needs it - which is often, considering his penchant for working overtime for an extra buck or two - and while people here don’t exactly _like_ him (who does, honestly), they know him, they know his tics and his reclusiveness and don’t judge him outwardly for it, and that’s about all a damaged husk of a thing like him can ask for. But he can do this. He can be a mindless tool, lifting boxes and putting things on top of each other and shoveling ice on top of the dead-eyed gaping heads of fishes and watching his breath crisp over in the meat lockers and freezers. He’s not weak, and he’s got the sturdy build that lets him shift things that would take two men to lift.

The places in Pauper’s Drop are far from perfect, but they suit him well enough. He’s not meant for anything great down here in Rapture. He’s just one of the faceless hundreds of working-class chumps hired to maintain Ryan’s vision of elite supermen. It pays well and it keeps him out of the public eye, so really, what more could he ask for?

What more does he have a _right_ to ask for?

The Drop is lonely and silent and bereft of activity on a good day. No one who lives here wants to whittle their time away in the slums of Rapture. Who _would._

Tim wakes with cold sweat prickling on his brow, his heart thudding angrily in his chest and his breath coming out in raw gasps, after barely three hours of legitimate shut-eye. The shifting light thrown from the ocean illuminates the room with an unearthly blueish glow. His arms tingle with goosebumps. His breath hitches into a ragged cough. He can’t stop shivering.

So just like any other night, then. 

At least he woke in his bed, and not in the streets. Not in front of some poor terrified bastard, trembling like a leaf as he stared at someone who he thought was _dead_.

Tim rolls upright, an awkward maneuver given the fact that his bed is little more than a hastily put-together mattress laid flat against the room’s floor (“Sorry,” Bill had said in his thick Cockney drawl, an apologetic hand going to the back of his neck, “we’re all full up tonight, Mr. Wright. Sure we can put somethin’ together, I think. S’just pretty last minute. I know y’understand.”) and shuts his eyes while he tries to keep his chest from jerking and hiccuping in the throes of another coughing fit, to no avail. Tim screws his eyes shut and braces one hand against the mattress’s soft edge. So much for a good night’s sleep.

 _Good night’s sleep._ What a goddamn joke. A joke for people like him, weird little warped freaks who can’t sleep and on a bad day can’t even see straight for all the alarm bells going off in their heads. He’s passed up on every movie showing, even Cohen’s grand premieres, for that very reason. Can’t look at those flashing lights for too long before his stomach starts lurching and his whole body goes rigid. Just one of those joys of being him. It’s frankly a wonder that he was even allowed to work down here with a medical history like his, files on his mental health thicker than the goddamned Oxford Dictionary. It’s a blessing that people who just wanted the work weren’t looked at too closely. They weren’t worth the extra scrutiny, just knowledge of a solid enough work history to warrant getting to flip burgers or carry boxes so the wealthy upper-class don’t have to.

Tim scrubs a hand over his face, through his thick mop of hair. Just once, just goddamned _once_ in his life he’d like to get a decent night’s sleep, or even just more than the three-to-five hour average he’s been bragging for as long as he can remember.

He can’t remember what it was he’d been dreaming about. Par for the course, he thinks darkly. He needs to turn his mind away. He needs to find a distraction, a rumination, something, anything. He needs to be someone other than himself. He doesn’t know what happens when he stops being himself, honestly, and that scares the shit out of him.

He digs through his pockets for the pack of cigarettes he’s gotta have stashed away somewhere. He finds them in a pinch, but the longer he searches his pockets, he starts to curse under his breath. No matches. And he’s not really a plasmid kinda guy, no matter what Fontaine says to make those things sound appealing. Fire at your fingertips sounds convincing until it’s the fire that ends up burning you from the inside out. Too many of Tim’s nightmares end in burning, watching his hair and clothes and skin get slowly singed to ash, fire eating through his organs and charring fingertips as he watches his hands crumble into skeletal silhouettes that writhe and blacken, for him to be one-hundred-percent sold with jamming a needle into his vein and scrambling his genetic code, or whatever the fancy five-dollar lingo is for what those plasmids do. He figures his genetics are fucked enough without inviting that extra ingredient to the mess.

Besides, he’s got some cranial problems to solve, the sort that no amount of percussive maintenance will make disappear. Unless he can get that figured out, he’s made that a hard and fast rule to himself: no plasmids. No ADAM. No rewiring his biology for the sake of some added convenience. Hell, he’s just waiting to hear about the stomach-turning side-effects. No miracle drug like that one is gonna exist without ‘em.

Of course, it’d be easier to get some treatment for whatever the hell is going on in his melon if the Medical Pavilion hadn’t shifted its entire market to purely aesthetic treatments. Fixing noses, shaping bodies, smoothing everyone into one uniform statement of beauty, and leaving people like Tim in the dust.

Well, that’s fine. It’s not like he’s not used to it.

The thought is nauseating, so he tries to direct his mind’s attention to somewhere else. Like - the job.

His job’s boring as tar.

His co-workers.

Well-meaning, maybe, but dull as doornails and not honestly compelled to give much of a damn about Tim’s fluctuating mental health.

...Rapture?

A rusting tin can with too many leaks. It’s a doomed endeavor. Tim won’t bother to hide his viewpoint on that. Maybe it’s scandalous. Maybe it’s blasphemy, down here, the alleged ‘paradise’ meant to be devoid of gods or kings. He doesn’t care. What’re they gonna do, kick him back to the surface? Set him floating off into the brine? Something like that’d be a goddamned relief.

Tim actually snorts aloud at the thought, or rather, he means to. It comes out weak and shaky and more like a tremble. His hands won’t stop shaking.

 _He_ \- can’t stop shaking.

Think, Tim. Think of something. Think of anything.

But why’s he gone stiff.

Why can’t he stop shaking.

Why does he _hurt._

He can’t breathe oh god oh _god_

And his mind’s gone blank and when his mind goes blank it goes to places he can’t entirely

and there’s that itch of a temptation, still, to go rummaging in through those discomfiting corners of his mind

there’s the memory lurking there that maybe if he were to peel away his skin and step out from his skeleton he’d be something less than human (memory or ghost) sometimes he fears he might not be real (he exists as a dream in someone’s head and when they wake he fades again) or that his skull and his body and his hands aren’t his (where they ever) and something out there _shifts_ in the dim-lit smoky haze (where without he would become it) and he’d walk away with arms falling from his sides speaking only in hands (in hands) while his eyes would drop from his face and his spine would stretch with the ghastly creaking of bone (his frame melts into depthless obsidian and reaches to the fingers of sunlight peaking through the veil from a rock-strewn ocean floor) and he thinks one of these days his skin might become like coral (pocked with holes and spongy softness with the air hissing through him like wind through cliffs) but one day he might have been less than a whisper (some days he’s larger than his body and he towers) (some days he has no fingers and some days they go on forever and click with each twitch) (some days his bones twist into knobbed antlers that scratch the sky) (some days he is filled with too many teeth) (some days he wakes up with skin stretched over his mouth and it gags him into silence) (some days he sees nothing at all) (some days he is filled with claws piercing the inside of his stomach and howling to be let out) (some days his jawbone drops from his skull and he feels that a weight has been lifted) (some days dark and nameless things skitter hotly down his throat) (he is filled with himself) (too many hands) (too many teeth) (he counts his teeth) (he counts his eyes and he finds he doesn't have any) (how does he watch with no eyes) (does he see past skin bleaching ghostly white) (does he see past the static blaring in gray and white sheets) (does he hear himself whisper) does he hear himself scream he is screaming he's (some days something tears its way out of him and it wears his skin for a suit but one day it’ll unfurl like a vine or a flower in bloom and toss his crumpled sheet of skin and wet glistening lumps of organs aside like old ragdolls) (some days his skull splits with the pain in his head) (some days his eyes are cameras) those black blinking lenses glare blankly at him (some days his ears are gramophones) how did that old tune go how much is that doggy in the doggy in the doggy in the (some days he can hear something singing deep in his bones) (some days he is seized with the wild impulse to scratch at his skin until he can claw away the outside and dig out the marrow) he has to pull himself out (he knows he gets lost sometimes in the woods) he has to step back into himself (he can feel the air where it’s cool and he doesn’t need to breathe) he has to reach back to the parts of himself he can still feel and not become untethered (some days he is charged with a power that makes his arms and legs tremble but it is not the sickly kind of power that pumps in his blood because those are the days where he has no blood and is drained dry as bone but it is the kind of power that resonates that makes him think he can run forever and flit through trees and snatch little skittering things that dart between his worn fingerbone-fingertips and prise them apart and shave the wings from their backs and shed the skin from their bodies so he can nudge through the dark wet sacks of organs and the rainbow sheen of oil pouring slick and sickly out from their weak little cages of muscle and bone and wonder how they tick tick tick tick tick tick tick) is he himself (all the little things scream as he watches them burn like moths against a stilling flame) he has to reach back for his skin and put it back on he has to become who he is again and not get lost in the inkblot-void of what lingers in darkling stillness but he sees it he sees (how can he see with no eyes) he hears (without ears) he knows (his brain worn to nothing by the gnawing of so many teeth) he reaches (with fingers that go on like white branches of bone) he feels (with nerves that dropped from his arms like leaves from a tree) (he is not in the woods) (he is not in the woods) (he is not in the woods)

(he was never in the woods)


	5. [ lighting the match ]

**FORT FROLIC - SEPTEMBER 8, 1958**

He told himself he wouldn’t end up here again.

At least he skipped over the cocktail lounge this time. No drinking, he’d told himself firmly upon entering the Metro Station. No alcohol. Just wanting to talk to an old friend.

‘Friend’ in the loose sense of the term, in any case.

He recognizes the bartender as he passes the cocktail lounge, though he’s sure to speed up his pace to keep the other man from recognizing him. He’s not sure he wants to be remembered after tossing up the remains of his lunch in one of the Fort’s bathyspheres. Instead he steers himself stubbornly around any and all liquor-related venues. The lures of gambling and strip joints are even more easily avoided, given the lack of any sufficient day’s wages in his pockets. It had been a slow business day after the pawn shop’s opening was delayed by the poor passed-out bastard lying facedown not two yards away. The sight of that must’ve been off-putting enough to anyone who might’ve been passing by, and the day just grew progressively worse and increasingly uneventful from there.

Tonight’s not looking to go any better, but Jay’s gotten sick of sitting on his hands. He’s gotten sick of days crawling by without purpose, of hanging photos up in his tiny room in the Drop and trying to cherry-pick the best ones from the batch, only to fling the whole of them into the trash out of frustration - and then painstakingly peel them back out later, feeling absurdly like he should be apologizing to each one for the trouble.

Directionless, dreamless, helpless, hopeless. But Alex went and built a name for himself right from the start, didn’t he? And he’s the one who planted the damn idea in Jay’s head in the first place. So, yeah, that was the line of logic there. And now Jay wants some answers.

It would help if he didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg just to _attend_ a show that Alex might be at, or if he had any real idea of where to start when it came to looking for the man. If it was Cohen, he’d just look for the nearest poster advertising his latest show, and he’d know that the man himself wouldn’t be very far away. Alex is more nebulous, and Jay hasn’t been around the Fort often enough to know about his usual haunts, if he even has them.

So he’s keeping an eye out for _any_ of Cohen’s lot, though it’s doubtful he’ll get the chance to talk to any of them. They’re the kinds of people who usually have someone draped on their arm and a horde of admirers packed tightly around them. But Alex hasn’t been catapulted into stardom like Silas Cobb or Hector Rodriguez or any one of Cohen’s other higher-profile disciples. Jay doesn’t even know what Alex really _does_ for Cohen, though he’d take a wild stab in the dark and assume it’s something in the ballpark of ‘cameraman’.

“Excuse me - ”

“Excuse me, uh - ”

“Do you know where I could find - ”

“Alex Kralie, he’s, uh, I think he’s a camera-type...person - ”

“ - where I might find a Mr. Kralie? He’s a friend, er, I know him - ”

“Kralie. Alex Kralie? No?”

Shuffling around and getting his knobby elbows in people’s ribs while he tries asking strangers questions about where he might find Alex isn’t how he’d planned on spending his night, but it’s not like his prior plans were any better. Take photographs, hope for better things, and know, bitterly, that he’ll never launch himself to anyplace higher than he is now. Tear down his photos in abject frustration, only to tack them all up again. It’s like he’s caught in a loop.

He gets turned around somewhere in Poseidon Plaza (he thinks?) and amidst the storm of people, his head starts to spin. Not wanting a repeat of the last time he visited the Fort, Jay hastens to sit down. There’s a line of red X’s emblazoned across his vision. He doesn’t really know what that means, but if there’s seating inside, he’ll take it.

The automatic doors hush quietly open and he slips inside. The lighting is dark, a relief on his eyes, but the murmur of voices downstairs hints that the place is packed. Jay pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger as he leans forward and breathes to stop his stomach from lurching into knots. Bile swells in his throat and he sucks in another deep, cleansing breath. No, no. Come on. Breathe. Breathe.

“It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for,” a woman’s voice murmurs into a microphone. “And I know, believe me. So I won’t keep you any longer. It’s Andrew Ryan’s favorite gal - _Jasmine Jolene!”_

Jay’s head shoots up, momentarily dazed out of his incipient panic.

Eve’s Garden.

He’s in Eve’s Garden.

Jay grimaces. He hastens to slip outside before the show can start.

He’s still trembling as he cuts a brisk way through Poseidon Plaza’s upper level. Fort Frolic is _really_ not his scene. He wouldn’t have thought it would be Alex’s either, but it’s not like he ever knew the man all that well. In fact, if he’s learned anything these past few days, it’s that he really, really, _really_ doesn’t.

He’ll call it sheer luck that he crashes into someone and nearly sends her sprawling, luck or the lack thereof. He catches at her arm clumsily to steady her.

“Sorry,” he mutters, eyes downcast. “Sorry. Wasn’t - ”

“Sorry,” she echoes as she gently pulls from his grip. He glances up and realizes with a thud in his chest that he recognizes that long flare of blonde hair trailing down to her back.

“Amy?” he says incredulously.

The woman pauses before she steps around him, eyeing him curiously.

“I’m sorry?”

Jay’s mouth is dry. He recognizes her. He remembers her. He’s glimpsed her in photos, in Apollo Square, seen her name on Alex’s photographs. This could actually be just his luck. For once. “Are you Amy?”

She vacillates for a long moment, looking out at some indeterminate point in the crowd before glancing back his way again.

“Who’s asking?”

“Uh, Jay. I’m Jay. Jay Merrick?” He holds out a hand. “I’m an old friend of, um, I’m a friend of Alex Kralie’s?”

A veneer slides neatly over her cautious intrigue, locking her expression into something fiercer, colder.

Oops.

“I haven’t seen him,” Amy says coolly. “Not since a few nights ago.”

“I just mean, uh, if you, if you see him again, you know,” Jay stammers, “just to, you know, tell him that I said hi. And - that I’d like to talk to him. It’s important.”

“I’m sure it is.”

And, great. She’s inching further and further away from him by the second.

“Look, I - I knew him,” he says, frantic and hurried, “on the surface. Before all this. If there’s any chance he remembers - ”

Amy scrutinizes him carefully.

Jay holds his breath.

“I don’t know how much you know,” she says at last, the words little more than a weary sigh. “But Alex isn’t the same man you knew on the surface. He isn’t the same man I knew, either.”

“What, uh - ”

“He disappears for weeks at a time.” She isn’t looking at him anymore, more or less addressing the patch of empty air just over his shoulder, her eyes distant and dead. “Ever since Cohen took notice of him, it’s just been - he’s been different.”

“Different how?” says Jay, drawing out the words with trepidation.

Amy shrugs tiredly.

“Well, the ADAM certainly didn’t help.”

Jay’s blood runs cold.

“He’s been splicing?”

“Of course he has.” A bitter note enters her tone. “All of Cohen’s _disciples_ are these days.”

Well, great. Clearly there’s some kind of interpersonal conflict going on here, and one Jay’s probably not qualified to address. But if it gets him one step closer to the man who brought him here -

“I just need his address,” he says, low and urgent, the words nearly swallowed by the drone of voices from the streamlined crowds of passers-by. “I just need to talk to him. I can help. I _want_ to help.”

Amy searches his eyes for a long moment. There’s an emotion lingering there he can’t place.

Then she sighs.

“He’s in the Cameron Suites,” she says, looking away. “Apartment 4. I can’t guarantee he’ll be there now.”

Jay thanks her with a small, tight smile. It’s good enough.

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

It took him entirely too long to hunt down the right door, and he has to double-check before he raps against the gleaming varnish. The way Amy had been talking, it sounded like she and Alex weren’t seeing eye to eye these days. Jay can’t really say he’s surprised, but he’s not exactly qualified to say. He’s never been one for judging the duration of relationships, especially not ones as weirdly undefined as Alex and Amy’s. He doesn’t know either of them well enough to make that call.

There’s a soft shifting that implies someone might be inside. Jay scowls and knocks again, harder this time. Again, no response.

The door swings open while his hand is still poised to hammer on the door for the third time, and Jay freezes.

“ - not what I had in mind.” The man at the door turns to face him and blinks, brow furrowing. He looks somewhere between confused and disdainful. “Can I help you?”

Jay gapes.

Standing in front of him is none other than _Kyle Fitzpatrick,_ Cohen’s famed pianist. _The_ pianist, one of the most well-known musicians in Rapture, _period._ He blanches as every word he’d intended for Alex flies from his head. What is _Kyle Fitzpatrick_ doing in _Alex’s apartment._

“Shit or get off the pot, buddy,” says Fitzpatrick, jaw cracking in a luxurious yawn. “I don’t have time for this.”

Jay’s mouth works soundlessly for a moment before he’s able to recover his voice.

“Alex,” he says faintly. “Um. Kralie. I’m looking for Alex Kralie?”

Fitzpatrick leans against the doorframe. “Aren’t we all.”

“I was told he lives here.”

“Yeah?” Fitzpatrick cocks his head. “Hm. Funny, that.”

“Do you know where I could find him?” Jay snaps it out far more fiercely, frustration cracking in the hard bite of the consonants. The novelty of the initial awe is fading fast.

Fitzpatrick blinks, maybe taken off guard by the abrupt shift in disposition.

“No idea.”

“This is his apartment.” And now he’s starting to feel _desperate_ on top of it. “He should be here.”

“Wish I could help you,” says Fitzpatrick in a tone that suggests the exact opposite. “But I got no clue. Come back later, maybe. Or, on second thought, don’t.”

He swings the door shut.

Or he tries to.

Jay, in a wild, reckless burst of determination and exhaustion and frustration, jams his foot into the gap between the door and the frame. The door slams against his toes, nearly crushing them, and reflexive tears spring into his eyes. He grits his teeth and clamps one hand over the knob.

“I’m not leaving,” he grinds out slowly, deliberately, “until I know where Alex is.”

“Cut it out,” says Fitzpatrick, his former detached air dissolving. His eyes darken. “And _get outta here,_ before I call Rapture Security.”

“I just need to find Alex,” says Jay. Christ, but his foot really hurts. He can almost feel the bones popping. “Please, just _tell me where he is.”_

He told himself he’d do this now and so he will. He needs his answers. He needs to know _why._

Fitzpatrick slams a knee into his gut. Taken aback, Jay immediately doubles over, hands wrapping around his midriff as he crashes into the wall opposite the door. His foot throbs. His stomach lurches threateningly. He feels like he’s about to puke.

“You wanna do this now?” says Fitzpatrick.

Delicate fingers slide beneath Jay’s chin and jerk it upright, forcing him to look the other man in the eyes. Jay flinches, barely able to _think_ through the nausea clenching around his gut.

Fitzpatrick snaps the fingers of his free hand once. A hot tongue of flame leaps up from his thumb. He holds it out until the stilling fire tickles the skin just under Jay’s eye. Jay goes rigid, straining to keep his face as far away from the heat as possible. He swears he can feel the skin around his cheekbone crackling as the air grows uncomfortably, blisteringly hot.

“I’m not gonna ask you again,” says Fitzpatrick, his diction velvet-soft. “You need to leave. And then? You need to not come back.”

Jay sucks in his breath in an involuntary gasp as the flame twitches closer. It feels like his eyelid is actually shriveling away.

“Do you understand?”

He’s too terrified to nod, but Fitzpatrick doesn’t seem to care. He jerks Jay’s chin up and down once in a forced nod and pushes the smaller man roughly away.

“Fans,” he says with a quiet, self-indulgent smile. “Never know how to take a hint.”

He locks the door to Alex’s apartment with the click of a sliding bolt, leaving Jay hunched in the hall with one hand massaging his right eye, the other still curled around his middle.

Who the hell is Alex to this guy, that he’d be willing to kick some nothing to the curb on his behalf? Jay stays huddled there, struggling to get his breathing and his heartbeat down to manageable levels as he hopes to god that he’s not going to be sick.

Eventually he gets one arm propped against the wall and uses that as leverage to push himself back into a standing position even if he’s to to lean heavily against that solid surface to stay upright. Kyle Fitzpatrick might have all that impressive fame and fortune, but that’s not enough to scare Jay from his goal and take him off Alex’s case entirely.

If Alex isn’t in, all he has to do is wait for him to come back. It’s not like he has anything else going on tonight.

Turns out he doesn’t have long to wait.

He almost doesn’t recognize the tall shape that comes stumbling into the hall not thirty minutes later, coughing into his hands with his eyes red-rimmed and his hair a disarray. The sheer dissonance between that and his fine-tailored clothing, the red marbled patterns swirled on his vest, is enough to make Jay perform a spectacular double-take.

“Alex?”

The other man halts just outside the door to Apartment 4 with the jangle of keys over varnished wood.

“Alex, it’s me.” Jay steps into his line of sight with a hopeful wave. “Jay? Jay Merrick?”

Alex looks at him blankly for a minute before shaking his head once, like he needs to clear it. Is he drunk? Spliced up? Jay can really only guess. Who knows what goes into the drinks and things that get passed around at Cohen’s performances and galas.

“Alex?” He’s starting to lose his optimistic momentum. Jay takes a cautious step back. “Are you okay?”

“Uhhhhh.” Alex blinks once, slowly, and shakes his head. “Uhh. No, um. Just gimme a, gimme a minute.”

He unlocks his door and shuts it tightly behind him before Jay can say another word. Frustrated but not ready to give up while so close to his goal, Jay presses his ear against the door. The faint murmur of voices drifts in and out from behind it, but he can’t discern any of the words.

He’s entirely unprepared for the door to bang open again, and it nearly takes his head off when it does.

“Hey.” Alex’s eyes are still faintly bloodshot, but he’s no longer half-stooped over and unsteady on his feet. Did he just _splice_ in the interim? Shoot himself up with EVE, or with ADAM? Is that why he was so seemingly unstable? “It’s Jay, right?”

Jay nods. He’s not sure whether he should be apprehensive or relieved. “Yeah.”

“Jay. Huh.” Alex’s eyes cloud over briefly. “Think I remember you. Photography, right?”

Jay can’t think of anything else to say. He nods again. 

“Thought so. Let’s walk, huh?”

“Yeah.” He’s having trouble finding his voice. “That sounds good.”

“Great.” Alex doesn’t bother to lock the door, seeing as Fitzpatrick is...presumably still in there, but simply strides down the hall. His movements are confident and fluid, no longer choppy and erratic and staggering.

“I haven’t really, um, heard from you,” Jay begins faintly. “Since, you know, moving down here. You sorta vanished.”

“I got busy.” Alex shrugs, unperturbed. Jay tries to catch the other man’s eye, but he seems preoccupied with looking ahead as he threads his way around the dense clusters of Rapture citizens. “Caught up in things, you know how it is. Cohen’s kind of a demanding employer.”

“You said you remembered me.”

“Yeah?” Alex still isn’t looking at him. “Well, we ran in the same circles.”

“Not anymore, though.”

Alex slows, a faint crease darkening his brow.

“What’re you trying to say?”

“You led me down here.” Jay darts around to plant himself in front of the other man, his expression set. “You were the one who _suggested_ it. You’re living in Fort Frolic, and I’m stuck in the Drop with a dead-end job and a camera I never use.”

“So?” Alex’s tone sharpens as he narrows his eyes. “It’s every man for himself down here, you know that.”

“I just want to know,” and he has to swallow to trim the pleading edge from the words because that is _not_ why he’s here, at _all,_ “if you could - put in a good word for me, maybe. Just to help me out.”

Alex sighs and rubs at his arm with one hand. “You know that’s not how it works.”

“If you could _try - ”_

“I can’t get you anywhere,” Alex cuts across him shortly. “I’m not one of Cohen’s inner circle. Not yet, anyway. When that time comes, maybe, but until then?” He looks at Jay with a helpless little shake of his head. “No dice, Merrick.”

“You can’t - ” 

_”No,_ Jay, I can’t.”

Alex turns away, looking like he’s about to head back the way they came, back home, back to the Cameron Suites, back out of Jay’s life.

He _dragged_ him down here. He brought Jay down to his level. The _least_ he can do is pay him back somehow. Jay’s _earned_ that, hasn’t he?

Jay wets his lips.

“What about ADAM?” He fires at the man’s retreating back.

Alex half-turns, eyeing him suspiciously.

“What about it?”

“Not a lotta places in the Drop supply it,” says Jay, the words spilling out in a fevered stream. Christ, but is he really doing this. He knows this is bad. He just _saw_ what Alex was like, the red latticework of veins cobwebbed over the whites of his eyes as he hacked into his clenched fist like a man struck with the flu.

This is a bad idea.

Then the too-recent memory of Kyle Fitzpatrick trapping him against the wall with a bright spark spilling out between thumb and forefinger, his eyes alight with a vicious glow, reverberates in Jay’s skull, and his mind is made up.

“But, uh, you - you can, can’t you?” says Jay. “Just enough to, you know.”

The sentence terminates before he has any idea of where he planned for it to go.

Alex pins him with a long, inscrutable look.

“Wait here,” he says.

He doesn’t have any guarantee that Alex will deliver, especially considering how long it took him to track down the man in the first place.

Jay waits.

He doesn’t have any other choice.


	6. [ the broken noose ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The German phrases have hover descriptions. Simply hover your mouse over the text for a translation.
> 
> I am not a German speaker, and I am sure that this is obvious. I preemptively apologize to any and all German speakers who might read this.

**FONTAINE FUTURISTICS - September 12, 1958**

“Try it now!” Jessica calls from the floor beneath. She pauses for a moment, waiting for the inevitable clunk and clang of the heating control upstairs again refusing to work, and the sigh of the lone scientist unlucky enough to have been the one to call Jessica in.

“No.” There’s a dull _thud_ of a palm striking metal in frustration. “No good. Still the same.”

“Still?” Jessica sighs and dashes the back of her wrist across her brow where the sweat has begun to bead. This place is supposed to be all fancy and well-to-do, given Fontaine’s whole escalating business expansion. Why, then, is the building’s central heating control refusing to _cooperate._ It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then, that’s what she’s here for.

“All right,” she calls. “Stay put. I’m coming back up.”

She shimmies up the narrow ladder and clambers through the open hatch. Tenenbaum is waiting for her at the top, her expression dour and frustrated.

“It has been hours now,” she says, and runs her hands up and down her arms. _“ Es friert mich._ We are freezing in this building, _und_ Fontaine cannot afford better heating?”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Jessica says glumly. “I’m sorry. This looks like some pretty high-quality equipment. I don’t know why it’s not - it _should_ be working by now.” It’s not much by the way of consolation, and she knows it. She pulls off her gloves and lays them atop the unresponsive machinery. “Look, I’ll call it in to my boss, okay? See if he can get some better equipment to fix whatever the hell this thing’s deal is.” She bumps the great steel-pipe monstrosity with the heel of her boot, none too gently, scowling.

 _“ Ich verstehe_,” says the scientist. She rubs her hands together. The woman’s so pale it’s hard to tell if she’s really bluing at the edges from the cold, though Jessica frankly wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case. This had been a _morning_ appointment, the repair request called in late last night, and her list of later appointments had gotten pushed back and pushed back and pushed back until she was now unofficially working overtime to repair one stupid unresponsive heating system. It was driving her up the _wall,_ and she doubts Tenenbaum is having a good time of it either. She’d offered to deal with the machine herself, but the biologist had flapped a hand at her and stubbornly insisted that she see the trouble through.

“I cannot think for all this shivering,” she had said, her words thick with the guttural German consonants. “It is making my work very difficult.”

Jessica hadn’t pushed the point.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But like I said, first thing tomorrow, okay?”

“I’ll be waiting,” says the other woman, but she’s clearly unhappy with the outcome. Jessica frankly doesn’t blame her.

“You should probably get home too.” She retrieves her gloves and starts back down the ladder to pack up her tools. “Place is only gonna get colder.”

Tenenbaum doesn’t reply. When Jessica re-ascends the latter, she’s drumming her fingers against the machinery, her nails rattling an impatient staccato tattoo.

Jessica hovers in the doorway, waiting for the other woman to follow her out, but Tenenbaum makes no motion to do so. Jessica shrugs and parts ways with her there and then.

The lobby is dark and deserted when she reaches it. The bronze cast of the globe dominates the center of the room, but there’s still a ceiling light illuminating the single gene bank in the corner. Jessica simply shakes her head. Plasmids might be Fontaine’s finest greatest and most ingenious creations, but after seeing the absolute disaster of mechanical engineering his business headquarters has to boast, she thinks she’s earned the right to be a little skeptical of his enterprise. That, plus, well, the reason everyone else with sense stayed away from the stuff. She knows for a fact that, for Tenenbaum at least, the day had been unproductive.

The sign overlooking the lobby lights the entire place with a faintly eerie blue glow. Jessica has to squint at it to keep her retinas from stinging at the absurdly bright neon lines. One corner of her mouth pulls upward in a bitter smirk. If that sign’s where all of Fontaine’s money is going, no wonder his heating control is the absolute mess it is.

She almost makes it to the door when she hears the shattering of glass.

That’s roughly the point in time where her world implodes.

_”Move! Move! Move”_

There’s a flurry of barked commands, the thunder of boots over creaking wood floors. Jessica can’t see for the powdering of glass and wood streaming from the ceiling.

She takes cover at the first place she sees - the darkened corner just beside the rising stairwell, where she hunches, heart in her mouth. The chill of the building is no longer settling deeply into her bones. Adrenaline and the blood racing through her veins has warmed her well enough.

“Fontaine’s in here somewhere.”

Jessica slides one hand over her own mouth to keep anyone from hearing the rapid pace of her breath. The voices are drifting from directly over her head, and one of them is the unmistakable tone of Ryan’s Security Chief Sullivan.

“We find him and bring him to justice. Understood?”

There’s an indistinct murmur of assent.

“Office is upstairs.”

“I want officers covering every exit!”

“We still got employees in the building!”

“Bring ‘em in. We need all collaborators, anyone who might’ve been involved.”

“Right away.”

Jessica’s blood congeals into ice. She has little doubt that she’d be counted in that broad category, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong damn time. Andrew Ryan isn’t picky. People already tend to disappear, or get publicly smeared for having the gall to _disagree_ with the man.

No gods and kings, though, right? Only man. One man, with one hell of an ego.

“Any employees, I need you to rope ‘em in, bring ‘em to me. Mr. Ryan wants them all alive, you hear?”

‘Employees’ can only mean Tenenbaum. Jessica can only hope that for the other woman’s sake, there’s more than one way out of here. She tenses, peering out from her hiding place in search of a door.

Then she hears the screams.

Gunfire echoes almost immediately, but the chatter of lead and bullets isn’t enough to drown out the awful pitch of the wailing, the garbled streams of words gushing into the smoke-stained air.

_“I didn’t wanna hurt anybody, Dr. Jones! I didn’t wanna - !”_

_“I’m just LONELY, I’m - I’m LONELY!”_

_“I was gonna be a star, Mama! I was gonna be a star - now would you look at me! LOOK AT ME!”_

_“Tell me there’s still time - ”_

Jessica freezes, paralyzed as she presses herself against the corner of the stairwell in renewed terror.

Splicers.

And _that,_ frankly, was the other reason she stayed away from the ADAM. She’d seen the hideous distortions in the papers, faces swollen with tumors to the point of unrecognizability. The Medical Pavilion was making a fortune in ‘correcting’ those errors with reconstructive surgery, cutting the disfigurements out as quickly as they cropped up, but that didn’t seem to prevent the increased levels of violence, the addictive craze, the unshakeable lust for the ADAM that would keep the poor devils sated.

Those cases had been few and far between, she’d thought. Just the odd person reacting poorly to an overdose of that miraculous drug as it rewired their genes. She hadn’t thought Fontaine would be _keeping_ them -

God, what _else_ does that man have to hide. No wonder security’s crawling all over the place.

Of course, she sort of wishes she’d known that were the case _before_ she came here to fix up a busted central heating control -

_“You liar! Liar! LIAAAAR!”_

The tinkle of breaking glass. More gunshots. More howls, screams, a gurgling gasp as something sharp penetrates someone’s windpipe. The wet, thick spatter of liquid. 

Jessica screws her eyes shut.

She has to get out. As quickly as possible.

Splicers won’t care what side she’s on. They won’t care who she _is,_ period, which means she just has to get as far away from this disaster as humanly possible, and in very short order.

“Christ, these things are comin’ out of the goddamn woodwork!”

_“Get ‘em off me!”_

There’s an angry _crash,_ and Jessica can’t tell if the body hurled from the building’s upper balcony is a splicer of a security officer, and she doesn’t wait to find out. She bolts for the door. The glass has been blown clean out of the frames. Guess the Ryan’s security detail didn’t think much for damage control.

She looks back over her shoulder, once, unable to prevent the pang of guilt. She’d left Tenenbaum in there, assuming the other woman’s still alive.

She didn’t have any choice, Jessica tells herself grimly, over and over, knowing it won’t absolve her of anything. She didn’t have any choice.

Behind her, the mingled screams and stutter of gunfire assures her that the only person having a worse night than her is Frank Fontaine himself.


	7. [ cut the vine ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gets a warning for some serious body horror (especially for people who deal with trypophobia and get squicked by boils and the like) and some mind control/mental manipulation.

**APOLLO SQUARE - September 13, 1958**

Merrick is one persistent son of a bitch, he’ll give the man that. Shouldn’t be surprised, given the guy’s penchant for sinking his teeth into a story and never letting go. It’s what got him fired from that reporter job way back in the day, wasn’t it?

Hell if Alex knows. He never really got invested in the man’s personal life. Never had much of a reason to.

In the end, it’d taken the bribe of a plasmid to get Merrick off his back and keep him from blaming Alex for every little thing gone wrong in his life. He’d had to rummage through the meager supply of ADAM he still had - all while Fitzpatrick snored softly, passed out on his bed for reasons beyond him, particularly since he never gave the man a _key_ to the place - until he was able to unearth the clear glass container full of a thick crimson liquid, unlabeled. He’d turned the plasmid over and over in his hands, frowning at it suspiciously, but hadn’t found anything objectionable about it. Nothing that would indicate why he wouldn’t have already spliced it. Then again, he’d also found it crammed in a paper bag and shoved in the deepest recesses of his sock drawer like something to be forgotten, so that didn’t bode particularly well for the contents.

“You’ll need some EVE from a vending machine,” he’d muttered as he passed the heavy bag to Merrick, who clasped it to his chest like something precious. “Circus of Values. Any of ‘em should have what you need.”

He’d considered telling Merrick to not bother buying a hypo in the Fort, where all the prices were ratcheted up to the highest they would go, but quickly dismissed the idea. He was already forking over a plasmid for free. That was enough good will for the night.

Merrick hadn’t asked what it was, and thank _god_ the man’s survival instinct was so pathetically low that it hadn’t been a problem. Alex had been able to slip away without any further accusations from the weedy little mouse of a man, and from there he could just go right on hoping that their paths never cross again. He doesn’t need the dead weight in his life.

Amy’s been quiet. It’s only when Alex’s thoughts smooth over away from the events the few nights prior that he takes notice.

“You okay?” he asks her softly.

“I’m,” she says, then abruptly stops, her eyes flicking away. “I’m fine.”

Alex shrugs. “You just seem preoccupied.”

Amy makes a quiet noise whose emotion he can’t interpret. Alex wavers. The tension between them has been thinning to an almost unbearable strain, their conversations stiff and formal, ever since his little _encounter_ with Fitzpatrick several nights earlier. He’s still at a loss over how to tell her. He’s suspicious that she might know anyway, and is simply waiting for him to work up the balls to mention it first. There’s no reason she _would_ know. Fitzpatrick wouldn’t have told anyone - would he?

Maybe he would.

Alex nearly grinds his teeth. It’s mind games. He hates mind games.

“You said you didn’t have plans today,” he says hastily, a sloppy change of subject. “I was thinking, maybe - we could head to Arcadia. I hear it’s nice this time of year.”

And it sounds so _inane_ coming from him, so utterly bland and soulless. _This time of year._ As if Arcadia could be affected by something so trivial as the four seasons. There _are_ no seasons in an underwater city.

“You’ve just been distant,” says Amy slowly, delicately. “I feel like I never know what’s going on with you.”

“Nothing’s going on.” It’s a clumsy lie, but something else has caught Alex’s eye. He drifts away, oblivious to Amy’s frustrated sigh, and slides a few Rapture Dollars into the newspaper stand so he can peel one of the newest editions of the Rapture Standard free and stare at the huge, blaring headline in dismay.

_**"RYAN TAKES DOWN SMUGGLING OPERATION  
FONTAINE AND THUGS KILLED IN FIERY SHOOTOUT!"** _

“Jesus Christ.”

He lowers the newspaper in shock. Fontaine - the sole supplier and manufacturer of the plasmids, the ADAM - what’ll happen now? He can’t wrestle away the incipient tremble in his fingers, the burn beginning to seed itself into his veins. That itch, that _need_ for a fresh hypo, even though he’d been sure to inject a carefully measured amount this morning before meeting Amy at her place in Olympus Heights. Is this nerves? Psychosomatic? Something else? Christ, he doesn’t want to become a splicer. He doesn’t want to get to be like those twisted-up _things_ he’s glimpsed photos of, the things so swollen with cancerous growths and pustules that they barely even look human anymore, shambling around among the dregs of Rapture like zombies. He has to stifle the impulse to run fingers down his arms, over his neck, across his chin, just to be _absolutely certain_ that no tumorous boils have begun erupting all over his skin.

“Alex?” Amy’s transitioned from distant to worried in barely a heartbeat. She lays a hand on his shoulder, and Alex jerks impulsively at the feather-light touch. She immediately snatches her hand back.

“Alex,” she says, sharper. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

He shakes his head, his mouth dry, and wordlessly hands over the newspaper.

“Alex,” she says, drawing out the word, adopting the rising intonation of anticipatory calm. “It’ll be okay. This isn’t the end of anything.”

“I’ve been splicing,” he says hoarsely, holding out his hands. “I know you know, you don’t have to lie to me. I’ve been splicing - more and more every day, I - ”

God, what’s withdrawal from ADAM supposed to be _like?_ Ten times worse than anything he’s experienced, that much is pretty obvious. Chills? Fever dreams? Night terrors? Or is there no way to stop slow, inevitable metastasizing of the cells of his body as they turn on him and begin to cannibalize him from the inside out?

He can’t be panicking over this. He _can’t._

Amy slides her hands into his and tightens her grip, firm and resolute.

“It just means you’ll have to cut back,” she says. “It’s not the end of anything. It might even be for the best - ”

“You can’t _know_ that,” says Alex.

Her incisive, questioning stare, the intensity of her conviction, her breath, her perfume, her proximity - it’s all too much. He can’t hold himself under the judgment of her quizzical look, the weight of her _expectation._ Is this how Cohen feels, every minute of every day? Then no _wonder_ the man has royally lost it.

He tears himself out of her grasp and backs away, shaking his head.

“I gotta - ” he whispers, “I have to - ”

He can’t finish. He makes an unerring line for the nearest bulkhead, twists it open with a pneumatic hiss, and plunges through to the other side. He doesn’t care where he ends up. He just needs to get _out._

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**ARCADIA - September 13, 1958**

He’s pretty sure he passed through the old Welcome Center at some point, but his memory of his long, roundabout path through Rapture is such a blur that he can’t really say. The sweat is still cold over his brow as he wends his way through the tranquility of the Arcadia Glens, breathing in and out in staggered gulps of air.

There’s a Circus of Values on the wooden balcony overlooking the waterfall. Alex wets his too-dry, cracked lips. It hasn’t even been - how many hours since his last dose? How long can he keep this up? How long until the city runs clean out of EVE? What does he do once that happens?

The air in the Glens is too hot, too moist, too humid. He can’t tell if it’s dew or perspiration flecked on his hands and soaking his clothing. The fabric of his clothes clings to his skin. The scratch of the finer wear is stifling, unbearable. He unbuttons his vest, shucks off his jacket, rolls the sleeves of shirt up to his elbows, but now the air is too crisp, like something hitching claws under his skin. The interior of his lungs feel abraded, every breath too hoarse.

He can’t sit right in his own skin.

There’s an immense pressure sinking over his chest. He breaks into a fit of coughing, prompting twin disapproving looks from the couple that seems intent on necking on one of the benches below. Alex flaps a dismissive hand in their direction between dry hacks. He can’t do this. He can’t live another day, hour, minute, _whatever_ through this absolute _hell._ It’s too wet - too arid - his skin burning with a persistent tingle he can’t shake.

He can’t track the trajectory of how he got from there to where he is now, bills slipped into a vending machine, bright blue liquid searing a trail from needle to vein via the pinch of a needle. The empty hypo slips from his fingers and breaks cleanly across the ground with the quiet tinkle of shattering glass.

He has to - 

He has to _get out of here._

He twists around and nearly crashes into someone else.

“Woah!” She holds out a steadying hand, hovering it just over his shoulder without touching him. “You okay there, mister?”

“Yeah,” Alex pants, probably sounding anything but. “Yeah, I’m - fine. Just, uh, kinda - I gotta go.”

“Uh-huh,” she says dryly. “Okay, pal. Why don’t you sit down and - ”

_”No.”_

Something about the intensity of the word seems to take her off guard. She takes a step back in alarm. Then her gaze drifts to the shell of the broken hypo lying not two feet away, and her confusion clears.

“You need to slow down there, pal,” she says, low and quiet. “You’ve been splicing.”

“You _think?”_

The scornful question gets snarled out with more fierceness than Alex entirely intends. The woman’s eyes darken.

“Look,” she says. “Neither of us _want_ to be here, but while I’m here, I’m sure as hell not about to let you OD on some miracle drug so just _relax,_ all right?”

“Fontaine’s gone,” hisses Alex. “His whole operation - who’s gonna keep the city stocked with ADAM now?”

“I know, buddy,” she says warily. “I was _there,_ all right?” 

“This is all we’ve got left,” says Alex. There’s an odd spark in his chest. He can’t put a name to it. _”This.”_

He raises his hand, teeth bared. Something wild and fierce has sunk into him. He’s not about to stop it, not while this interloper is standing in his way, not while he has the power to put her down with a word. The rush is incredible. He’ll never deny himself this again. He can activate what he needs with a thought, a tiny mental command, and his biology responds accordingly.

Green pustules bubble out from the skin of his arm, stark and glistening and pulsating with a sickly energy. The largest of them detaches from his forearm and slips into the comfortable groove of his palm. He squeezes the bulbous growth once and it compresses faintly at his touch, the discharge still wet and running down between his fingers.

He’s spliced and _angry,_ and now this girl is in his way.

“What’re you - ” she says, her eyes widening.

He hurls the little pliable ball and it bursts over her, spraying the soporific green liquid over her face and her hair. She yelps and raises hands and arms to shield herself, but to no avail. The fumes are toxic. Her gaze is already clouding, her eyes glazing over as the pheromones begin to take hold.

Alex grins with a thrill of savage satisfaction. He really got his money’s worth this that Hypnotize plasmid.

“What’s your name?” he says. When she merely blinks at him, he scowls and rephrases. _“Tell me your name.”_

“Jessica.”

“Jessica?” The name has the faint ring of familiarity, but he dismisses it. “Tell you what, then, Jessica. Tell me what you know about Fontaine Futuristics.”

“It,” she starts, stops, then starts again. “It was all a blur. Ryan Security came in at night. There were splicers. They fought, and I - I got out.”

“All right,” says Alex, folding his arms over his chest. “What else?”

Jessica shrugs listlessly. “That’s all I remember. It happened so fast.”

Alex’s tone hardens. _”Tell me everything you know about what happened last night at Fontaine Futuristics.”_

A flicker of emotion arrests her features, but it fades quickly. Alex drums his fingers along the flat of his upper arm impatiently.

“There - was a scientist,” she says haltingly. “A biologist. Dr. Tenenbaum? I was assigned to fix the building heating control. It was broken. I stayed there all day, but then - when I tried to leave, Ryan Security came in at night. There were splicers. They fought - ”

“All right.” He holds up a hand, forestalling the repetition of information he already knows. “Fine.”

He rubs one hand down over his chin as he considers. The Hypnotize can’t last for much longer. He nods to himself and addresses Jessica again:

“I want you to leave Arcadia, all right? I want you to go home. And then, once you’ve done that? You’re gonna forget that any of this even happened. Okay?”

Again, she wavers. Alex sighs. Does he have to carefully outline his every command with this plasmid? Complete rip-off.

He repeats the order, and she slowly - _excruciatingly_ slowly - turns around and begins to walk in the opposite direction.

Alex lets his eyes slip shut as he massages the back of his neck with his free hand while the other begins to smooth itself back to its unblemished state. The swollen pinpricks of green boils ripple and fade into the uniform pale complexion of his skin.

Splicers at Fontaine’s. What was the guy playing at? He’d been well on his way to becoming the most successful man in Rapture, having built an enterprise to rival that of _Andrew Ryan._

In the end, Alex supposes it doesn’t matter. He gives his sore neck a final rub and sets off in the direction of the nearest Metro station.

The papers have read that the king is dead, and the castle is left for the taking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a small shout-out toward one of my not-so-secretly favorite musicals, Repo! The Genetic Opera.


	8. [ the world on his shoulders ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains some warnings for mentions of suicide ideation and self-harm, and a warning for social anxiety toward the end.

**NEPTUNE’S BOUNTY - September 15, 1958**

He just has to keep his head down, that’s all. He scans the papers desperately for any news of a sleepwalking freak, but other than some inquiries from his boss, he’s got no clue what happened in those seven days that went clean missing from his memory. An entire _week._ He’s lost time before, that’s just part of being _him,_ but never this much time - never a whole damn _week._ He was able to play it off this time - some babbled excuse about a cold or food poisoning, hell if he can remember - but there’s no accounting for what might happen should that _thing_ in the back of his head claw its way out again.

He’s taken to running hands through his hair, tracing the contours of his skull, checking and double-checking and triple-checking that there are no cracks forming along his scalp.

Of course, even if he _did_ end up doing something, he’s not sure the city would’ve taken notice. All everyone’s talking about these days is Fontaine. Fontaine dead, they’re saying. Fontaine shot, Fontaine’s business liquified, the ADAM and the plasmids stripped from the market.

Tim, for his part, can’t help but feel absurdly, sickeningly, selfishly grateful. It makes him feel like shit to admit it, but the shady business in Fontaine Fisheries always felt a little too close to home for him to be entirely comfortable with it. And this way, at least that business with the smuggling ring and the murmurs of things like bibles and other surface artifacts worming their way into Rapture won’t be landing anywhere near Tim’s doorstep. And that’s good. He prefers that. As much non-interference on his part as possible. He doesn’t want to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A week.

A week missing from his head.

What did he _do?_

His hands tremble subtly as he hefts each box. Yesterday he woke up in Apollo Square, crammed in some back alley, clothes heavy with saltwater and splotched with red. It wasn’t until he passed a newspaper stand that he’d glimpsed the date, and his blood had run cold. A whole _week_ this time, and no one’s said anything. Maybe whenever he disappears to...do whatever it is he does, he’s no different from any wandering spliced-up junkie. One can only hope.

His muscles are sore with every shift and step, like he went running for miles. He can practically feel his back creaking when he strains to lift a particularly heavy crate of something-or-other, packed full with ice and salt if the stench is any indication.

It’s frankly a damn miracle that he’s been allowed to keep his job after vanishing for a week without warning, but maybe it’s hard to hold onto workers down here if they keep disappearing into Fontaine’s smuggling ring. Or maybe they were, at one point. Tim can’t really be sure anymore, but he’s not one to question some rare good luck being thrust his way. He just rolls his shoulders and waits for his shift to end.

He passes through Medical out of habit on his rambling way home. He’s got a fistful of Rapture Dollars and some lingering curiosity over whether they might have anything for sore muscles.

He finds nothing but some framed posters promising an upcoming project to _Restore Health and Vigor at the Touch of a Button!_ Sounds like a dream. Maybe the _Vita-Chamber Project,_ whatever the hell that is, can repair broken-up brains as well.

Tim scowls and heads out. He’ll have to go the long way back to the Drop since he stopped here on a fool’s hope, and it’s not like he really needs the additional exercise, the way his whole body’s been aching since yesterday.

A vaguely familiar voice rings around the corner.

It’s none of his business.

He needs to keep going.

He just needs to keep his head down and go _home._

Tim pauses.

“ - something for like, a memory supplement, I don’t know. You’ve gotta have something, don’t you?”

Memory supplement.

A dark crease appears between lowered brows. Is this - _common?_

“I just _mean,_ like, if you’re having trouble remembering something. That’s not - _no.”_ The voice sighs. “I _haven’t_ been splicing. I don’t _do_ that. It’s gotta be something else - I don’t _know_ what!”

Judging by the coldly disparaging tone of whoever she’s been voicing her inquiries to, he’d guess she’s getting zero luck on that front. Tim shakes his head, scowling. People like them are on their own, just like they always were on the surface.

“Fine. _Fine.”_

Tim hastily tries to step back and make it look like he was _not_ just eavesdropping, to absolutely no success. He recognizes the woman that hesitates as she glances his way, and based on the recognition that floods her features, she recognizes him too.

“Hey,” she says slowly. Tim clenches his jaw. He can’t reasonably go on his way and pretend like he hadn’t heard her, so he turns and tries to twist one corner of his mouth up in an apologetic smile.

“Uh,” says Tim.

“It’s Tim, right?”

“Yeah,” he says. And now they’ve officially opened a dialogue. Great. “Jessica?”

“Yeah.” She fiddles with the ends of her hair. She seems to be having difficulty meeting his eyes. Maybe she’s questioning why she paused to say ‘hello’ as much as he is. “Um, didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Neither did I. I mean, I was just passing through, so - ”

“Yeah.” Jessica nods. Her eyes keep darting to train themselves on some distant point beyond his shoulder. Tim furiously tamps down the impulse to track the line of her gaze.

There’s nothing behind him.

Nothing has ever been behind him.

He’s checked all his life, and nothing ever is.

The back of his neck still prickles.

“Well,” he says, turning, “gotta go.”

“Tim,” says Jessica. Her tone is strange.

He stops dead.

“Have you ever - ” She breaks off, vacillating. He genuinely can’t tell if she’s going to finish her question or not. The seconds drag on, and Tim holds his breath.

He says nothing, and hopes she’ll do the same.

“Have you ever, maybe, experienced any kind of - memory loss?”

Tim blows out a long, slow breath.

“That’s kind of a complicated question.” He strains to keep his voice steady and isn’t completely sure he succeeds. He still can’t look at her.

“I know, I just - forget it.” There are footsteps as she retreats, presumably to leave this conversation hanging where it is.

“What d’you mean?” His tone sharpens as he turns partway. She can’t be talking about the same thing, can she? He thought he was the only one - he _had_ to be the only one.

“I just mean, you know.” Jessica rakes a hand through her hair, pushing it from her eyes. She’s smiling, but it doesn’t take a second look to realize how panicked of a smile it is, how desperate, how very, _very_ close to being unhinged it’s made her. Her eyes are shadowed. 

She looks like she’s at the end of her rope.

“I just mean - hours, chunks of time where you just - you can’t remember.” Her voice breaks for a tenuous moment. “I don’t - just the other day, I, I lost several _hours_. Just - gone. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what I _did.”_ She stares at the ground, arms wrapped around herself. “That’s never happened to me before.”

Her facade is cracking away at the seams, and Tim doesn’t know what to do. He closes his eyes for a minute, wets his lips.

What is she _asking_ of him.

“I think,” he says. His heart’s hammering in his chest, but the word is deceptively steady. “I think - we should go for a walk.”

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**APOLLO SQUARE - September 15, 1958**

“How long has this been going on?”

“Long as I can remember.” Tim nudges at a fragment of flaking cobblestone with the toe of his shoe and watches it skitter over the poorly-paved Square. Shit handiwork always goes into places for the city's lesser citizens. “I’ve always been - like this. I thought maybe coming down here would fix it - or just be a fresh start. I dunno.”

Maybe it’d been too naive to assume something as simple as a transition to an underwater city would fix the millions of problems running rampant in his head.

He kicks at the ground again, scuffing little puffs of dirt up around the sole of his foot. “Stupid.”

“Not really.” Jessica shoots him a rueful look. “Pressure changes this far underwater. All the water over us? That can have a really profound effect on your body’s chemistry. You never know.”

That actually startles a low, mirthless chuckle from him. “You learn that by fixing pipes?”

“Hey, pipes respond to pressure too.” Jessica shrugs. “The human body isn’t really so different. We got our own pipes running through us.” She traces the line of the thick vein running up the length of her inner wrist, all the way to the base of her palm. Her fingertip lingers there a little longer than it needs to for her to prove her point. Tim doesn’t see any of the scores of white lines that decorate his arms and shoulderblades and thighs, none of the faint marks of shit life choices on her arms that have long since chased up and down his.

Maybe he’s more like her than he thought. He’s not sure whether he finds the thought comforting or - not.

Having spilled his proverbial guts to the first person he’s felt safe enough to talk to in years - _actual_ years, now that he thinks of it - maybe he owes her that much, to talk about those trickier, scarier things that cut deeper _(ha)_ simply because they’re too _real._ Lost time and weeks slipping by without any memory of the days gone past are terrifying in their own way, but they don’t feel as biting and immediate as a razor against one’s own skin, tickling the fat blue vein at the center of the wrist. They’re too abstract. Too distant. Too isolated.

Jessica drops her arm, her expression darkening into a frown.

“What’s going on?”

Tim follows her eyes, and soon he realizes what she means. There’s a crowd gathering, slowly and inevitably condensing into a throng as they spill toward the southern end of the Square in a streamlined burst. It doesn’t take Jessica long to peel away from their secluded bench in that nice little out-of-the-way spot and start walking briskly in pursuit. Tim hangs back, hands buried deep in his pockets, his brow furrowed. He doesn’t want to delve into that thicket of elbows and chatter and tight-packed bodies. But Jessica looks back at him, eyebrows lifted in expectation, and he reluctantly follows her through the Square, past the skeletons of the wooden gallows erected in the center of Rapture to intimidate anyone who believed they could evade the harsh anti-contraband law. Tim can’t keep himself from eyeing the structure warily. A dessicated corpse is still hanging from one of the nooses, its tongue swollen and purple, its eyes dark and shriveled into its skull.

“It’s the old Hestia Chambers,” says Jessica, craning her neck to see above the sea of heads. “Fontaine’s Home for the Poor. Guess someone found a new use for it?”

“Yeah,” mutters Tim. Caring is a bit beyond him with the amount of people clustered in the same general area. The air around him has begun to grow hot, tickling his lungs, thick and unbearable. He shifts his weight back and nearly bumps into someone.

“What _is_ this?” Jessica murmurs.

Tim wonders desperately if she’d notice if he slipped away - but a frantic glance over his shoulder confirms that there’s no way to sidle out between a crowd this dense.

“Rapture should serve the _people,”_ an oddly-accented voice is bellowing in the distance. “Not the privileged! We deserve more than the dregs and the scraps. We deserve liberation. And we don’t just deserve it.”

Tim’s stomach tightens into an awful knot.

“We _demand it!”_

The distant silhouette of a man perched atop the raised dais that once supported a sign for Hestia Chambers is swallowed by a flurry of fists thrust into the air, the downtrodden lower-class of Rapture nodding and cheering in relieved agreement.

With the flurry of renewed energy, sweat begins to grease the inside of Tim’s palms, and he makes the unilateral decision that he’s had enough. He elbows his way through the crowd, disregarding any yelps of discomfort or dirty looks thrown his way, pushing roughly past a crowd of hired hands he recognizes from the fisheries, past the feeble tinny laughter of a Circus of Values, so he can brace his back against a wall and _breathe._

He doesn’t know if he left Jessica behind in the mass of people, but he finds doesn’t have the brain capacity to care just now. First he needs to get his goddamn heartrate under control.

The smell of fresh paper and glue tickles his overstimulated senses, and something crackles under his hand when he pushes away from the wall.

Heart thudding, Tim turns.

The walls of Apollo Square have been completely coated in posters, all bearing a faceless caricature and a single word:

**ATLAS**


	9. [ entomophobia ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> True to the chapter title, this chapter contains some MASSIVE warnings for serious body horror, needles/injections, drug use, and insect horror. You can probably tell what the content of this chapter entails.

**PAUPER’S DROP - September 17, 1958**

Jay’s been having a staring contest with a paper bag for several days now.

For a while he took the plasmid out and set it on top of his shabby little dresser, but the faint red glow emanating from behind the thick glass kept him up at night - more so than usual, anyway - and it prickled the back of his head with the feeling that he was being watched, or taunted, or judged, or something.

It’s stupid, the fact that he can’t bring himself to actually _take_ the plasmid even after it’s been given to him. He bought the EVE hypo and a batch of fresh, empty hypos just in case, specifically for the occasion, but he’s done nothing to prepare himself to go ahead and inject himself with the stuff that he went to such lengths to obtain.

He wets his lips and watches it nervously, poised on the edge of his dirty little mattress of a bed. His hands are tight along the edge, knuckles blanched.

The patterns of the ADAM swirling thickly from behind its jar are mesmerizing, almost beautiful in their own way.

He still doesn’t know what the plasmid is, and Alex hadn’t bothered to mention it before dumping the bag in his hands and promptly ducking out of Jay’s line of sight as quickly as he could. It could be anything. It could be the kind that lets him shoot fire from his fingertips, or ice, or it could be the kind that summons a gust of wind to blow objects back. He can’t know. There’s just no way to _know_ unless he takes it.

Jay rubs the crook of his elbow. He’s not squeamish about needles, not in particular. Sure, he’s not exactly _fond_ of them, but who is? No one, that’s who. He’s just not sure he wants to actually go to these lengths now that he’s presented with the option. Fontaine Futuristics has crumbled, and the whole business enterprise with it. Who knows when there’ll ever be a fresh supply of ADAM or EVE - if ever. This could be one of the few remaining plasmids in Rapture that hasn’t been shot into someone’s nucleotide chain already. This could be worth a fortune in a few days. Splicers, junkies _so_ desperate for one last hit -

And _that,_ Jay thinks hastily, is a _bad idea._ He doesn’t need to affiliate with splicers who’ve become distended and lopsided with the swelling of tumors and whatever the hell else. That’s bad news. He’s seen the papers, he’s read the stories. People who run into them end up gutted. They end up in _pieces,_ and worse.

But he wants to keep moving up, right?

(“Keep.” As if he’s ever moved anywhere but down his entire life.)

He wants to be - someone. Anyone. Alex started splicing when he fell in with Cohen’s crowd, and look where it got him. Fame, fortune, front row seats with Kyle Fitzpatrick. Maybe not a constant stream of attention, but that doesn’t sound very appealing. That’s not what Jay’s after, either. He just wants an improvement. He wants to be _going somewhere._ Doing Things With Himself. That’s what’s expected of him, isn’t it?

Isn’t that the Rapture Way Of Life™?

The early morning comes with a revelation of its own while Jay glances at the headline over his boss’s shoulder at work, and his eyes widen.

“Ryan Industries?” he says, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.

“Hm?” Espinoza doesn’t look up.

“I didn’t realize that, uh, Ryan was taking over the whole plasmid - thing,” Jay stammers. He can’t really hide the fact that he was reading over Espinoza’s shoulder, so he makes no effort to. “Ryan Industries nationalizing Fontaine’s business and everything.”

Espinoza lowers the paper so he can train Jay with a delicately arched brow.

“Sorry,” says Jay.

Espinoza shrugs and snaps the paper back up again. “Curious?”

“A little, yeah.”

“Well, someone’s gotta fill that void. ADAM’s too damn versatile to waste, y’know?”

“Yeah,” says Jay. He returns his attention to the counter, picking at the grout with a fingernail. “I guess.”

Maybe taking that plasmid wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. If Ryan Industries intends to reinvigorate the supply of ADAM, that means taking advantage of Alex’s bartered gift won’t leave him dead in the water, veins loaded with a substance no longer available to the general market.

“You, uh.” Jay glances surreptitiously in Espinoza’s direction, not _wanting_ to ask the question but knowing he’ll need to if he wants his intention to come across in _any_ way. No one can read him on looks and grunts alone. “When you’re done with the paper, d’you mind if I - take a look?”

“Since when’re you interested?” Espinoza snorts, but folds up his edition of the latest Tribune and hands it over with a yawn. Business has been slow today, like it usually is in the Drop. “Knock yourself out.”

He scans the lines of printed text anxiously. A lot of it is vague fluff and baseless speculation - par for the course in any news industry, and Jay would know that from experience. He worked as a reporter, albeit briefly on the surface, but journalism simply hadn’t suited his tastes. Mostly because his ‘tastes’ usually ended with him stammering too much to catch the interest of whoever it was he was meant to be interviewing. No one could blame him for only really being able to pursue a topic when it was of personal interest. That just didn’t make him the best reporter, is all.

A few lines denote some members of Ryan’s council resigning in protest. So nationalizing Fontaine Futuristics was a polarizing move on Ryan’s part, and the end result is that Rapture lost its biggest competitor. And over what? Smuggling?

The list of businesses Fontaine had racked up is impressively large, Jay has to give the man that. Fisheries, department stores, orphanages - he was versatile if nothing else. Still, Ryan’s only moving in on the plasmid business, with promises to “improve” the market like Fontaine never could. He said a few cursory words to mourn the man’s passing, but knowing the stiff tone of Ryan’s voice from his radio announcements, his stern, stony face, Jay has a hard time believing there’s any genuine remorse behind the confession.

Whatever.

He folds the paper and lays it flat on the counter. His heart’s beating - weirdly fast.

He’s made his decision.

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

He lays everything out neatly on a clean bedsheet before he begins, carefully assembling one of the flimsy hypos he managed to dig out of a scattering of miscellaneous items destined for the King Pawn trash. The hollow needle wobbles precariously in its glass jar and he has to carefully adjust it, tongue sticking out between his teeth, locking it into place with a firm click.

His heart hammers in his chest as he surveys his line of needles and hypos, meticulously sterilized and arranged like surgeon’s tools spread beneath his fingertips. He unscrews the cap to the plasmid and compresses the empty hypo plunger with trembling fingers. It takes him several tries to get the needle into the opening with all the shaking his wrist is doing. Slowly, he relinquishes the pressure of his thumb over the plunger and watches the vial fill with the thick red liquid.

He keeps going until every last drop has been siphoned from the glass jar.

Jay grimaces as he tries not to eye the needle warily. It’s not exactly a _small_ needle. And it’s also, unfortunately, a pretty large dose of ADAM he’s about to be injecting into his veins. This won’t be a simple in-and-out operation. It’s going to be a whole protracted, painful _thing._

Oh god. He swallows thickly. Maybe he should scrape the wastebasket in the corner of his room closer before he tries this. He didn’t eat much today, but he can already feel his breakfast boiling tumultuously in his gut.

He needs to make this quick. As quick as it _can_ be.

The symptoms of splicing are immediate, and some are ongoing. He’s got an EVE hypo lined up just after. His nerves jitter sickly in his throat, a hot, tight mess of his own poorly-repressed anxiety.

He holds his breath as he lowers the needle, slips it into the fractalizing blood vessel pumping in his wrist. Jay screws his eyes shut.

He can’t possibly go back now.

He squeezes the plunger.

He barely gets the hypo out in time before the convulsions start. Jay doubles over, arms clamped around his midriff with his jaws parted in a soundless howl of agony. A high, thin noise peels out from the back of his throat. His arms shiver, every nerve rebounding between cold and hot. He can’t breathe. He can’t _think._ There are pustules swelling and bursting along the front of his pale forearms and he can’t do anything but flinch as gluey yellow-green pus oozes from the mass of growths. Oh - oh _god_ there are things _crawling out of them -_

Jay jerks once, twice, spasmodically. His cheek scratches wood and he realizes he’s ended up on the floor. He doesn’t remember how he got here. There’s a high-pitched sound itching in his ears and he can’t swat it away. His arms feel like they’re coated in boiling lead.

That’s roughly the point where he remembers how to use his voice, but he can only remember how to use it for one thing.

So he screams.

He screams, and screams, and screams, and keeps screaming, and lightning shoots down his bones and in through his veins and his skin blisters over itself as _things_ scuttle out from the holes opening in his arms and hands, skittering over his knuckles, crawling beneath his clothes, into his mouth, his ears, burrowing beneath eyelids. He can feel the skin stretched tight over his bones as it hardens sickeningly, honeycomb-like, hexagonal patterns stitched across his palms.

It’s like he’s on fire, the prickling and burning just under his skin but try as he might he just can’t claw that _itch_ out from beneath where his skin crackles and ripples and -

Shadows have already wreathed Jay’s vision. It’s just a matter of letting them in.

Jay doesn’t know how long he lies there, splayed unevenly across his bedroom floor, staring without interest at the nondescript muddy color of his walls, a thin line of drool leaking from mouth to floor. The buzzing in his ears hasn’t gone away.

He can’t pinpoint the moment he recognizes that he should be trying to stand, or even the spark of reasoning that led him along that line of thought in the first place. He can’t remember what it is he was meant to be doing, and had continued to lie there on and on without purpose simply because it didn’t occur to him to think of a reason not to. He braces a hand along the floorboards and starts to lever himself upward, slow and steady. He makes it to his hands and knees.

That’s when he sees the back of his hands, still scabbed and bristling with yellow-black striped insects crawling in and out of the honeycombed holes and ridges that have molded themselves completely and irreversibly with his flesh.

Jay barely makes it to the trashcan in time. He thinks, dazedly, that the color of his stomach contents bears a striking resemblance to the discharge that bled from the boils on his arms that have now, at least, thankfully vanished. He can’t tell if they were some kind of hallucinatory coping mechanism to deal with the absolute _horror_ that is -

He gulps and glances down again.

Yep.

No, those definitely insects. Bees. Or wasps. Hornets?

He has hornets crawling all over his hands. And not just all over them - _in_ them, too, as he takes note that the hive-patterned holes punched into his palms go _all the way through_ and oh god here come the dry heaves again.

Hornets.

No wonder Alex was willing to give him this plasmid for free. Who would _want_ this? Or even think to _produce_ this? Who thought, hey, you know what this city needs? It needs people who can produce fucking _bees_ out of their _hands_ on a _whim_ because _there is such a market for that sort of thing._

At least they’re not stinging him, or making any attempt to do much of anything except contentedly dart in and out of the home they’ve made out of his hands.

He flexes his fingers a bit, experimentally, but the insects merely weave around the obstructions with some kind of intrinsic knowledge of where they might end up. That, Jay concedes, considering plasmids warrant a whole genetic rewrite, makes sense. He almost wants to see what happens if he opens his hand wider with the intent to do - whatever it is this plasmid is meant to do, but he realizes belatedly that he’s not quite done yet, is he. No. Still another injection to go.

The jar and hypo are still lying where they’ve been cast, jumbled haphazardly over the bed in parody of their earlier rigid order. The blue hypo of EVE isn’t quite so alluring anymore, but neither is it so overwhelmingly terrifying. It’s a necessity now, like food or water. Jay slips the needle into the vein in his wrist and depresses the plunger until the bright liquid has drained into his wrist.

It’s like an electric shock to his whole system. He flexes his hands again with a quiet _“whoa,”_ as the hot rush of EVE to his system supplements the ADAM carding its way into his genes, his veins, his wiry bent-double musculature. 

Something white crackles at the edge of his vision. He flinches, shaking his head, and nearly reaches to cover his eyes with a hand before he remembers what a horribly bad idea _that_ would be. So instead he squints, trying to peer past the flickers of sound, fuzzing like static in the corners of his mind.

_“Splicer at your six!”_

Jay whirls, overbalances, and nearly ends up on the ground again.

_“Move! Move!”_

He jumps, ducking his head under up-flung hands at the loud _bang_ of a phantom gun. The white flare of a ghostly corpse flits through the floor of his apartment as it topples and falls, silver spots blossoming over its chest.

His heart’s in his mouth again, eyes darting wildly as he tries to track the spectral movements. Is this a side effect? Something _worse?_ He can feel his own personal insect swarm crawling over the flesh of his arms, unperturbed.

_“The hell are you - ”_

_“Frank Fontaine, you are under arrest for criminal charges of - ”_

Dual pale silhouettes, recognizable as Ryan Security by their uniforms, raise guns in tandem.

_“Sorry boys,”_ someone answers in a slow Bronx drawl. _“I ain’t goin’ to Persephone. Or anywhere else, for that matter.”_

He glances over his shoulder but sees nothing, _nothing -_

The tips of guns flare as the weapons discharge -

Two bodies thud dully to the floor. Jay flinches at each impact, as though it’s their weight rattling his door in its frame and not his twitching paroxysmal reactions to the wraithlike narrative unfurling before his eyes.

_“Real cute.”_ Again, the source of the voice is indistinct. Jay shakes his head and nearly misses its low chuckle. _“Now pardon me, fellas, but I got places to be.”_

He stares at the pale spiders of his hands until the static-laced mist clears from his head. His eyes are watering and he blinks furiously, trying to clear the reflexive moisture from them. He has to grab the frame of his bed to haul himself shakily to his feet.

Whatever the hell that was, it’s over. It’s passed.

It was just a side-effect of the ADAM. He’s remembering now, the common lists of symptoms. ADAM is a renewable resource. Sometimes it gets filtered and recycled and sometimes the echoes of previous users leaves a kind of residue. He flexes his fingers one last time. There are insects buzzing at his fingertips.

He can protect himself now.

He’s safe.

But the knowledge of what he might’ve just seen - what he might’ve just _heard_ \- still weighs sick and heavy in the pit of his stomach.


	10. [ the ill intent ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suddenly a timeskip. Also mild hurt/comfort. I'm trying to keep MOSTLY to the original Rapture timeline and I don't want to make this a 100k word epic. I really really am trying not to make it into that

**APOLLO SQUARE - November 25, 1958**

Jessica’s not stupid - not stupid enough to buy everything Atlas is saying. But she has to at least admit that the guy’s got a _very_ good point. Rapture was built by the rich, for the rich, and that’s cleanly, plainly obvious in every arch and brick and stone and overpriced drink to be found. Problem is, a system like that can’t sustain itself. That much has already been proven by the way Jessica’s patching more and more faulty and breaking systems by the day because the working-class is stretched too thin, the lower-class too neglected, the upper-class too neglectful.

So, yeah. She’ll admit it. She attends Atlas’s rallies, watches from a safe distance. She reads his posters and propaganda. And a lot of it _is_ propaganda, empty promises from a man who surely can’t do much aside from rile up the masses.

Tim’s disappeared from her life again, quickly as he entered it. He hadn’t enjoyed the first protest they’d attended without meaning to, that much had been starkly apparent in the tremor in his hands, the way the whites of his eyes flared when he looked away from her. He’s not a terribly social guy, but she didn’t need to witness his near-breakdown to confirm _that._ That had been obvious from the beginning. It would’ve been nice to hear more of his advice on timekeeping, especially since the problem of memory loss had been something entirely new, terrifying and vertigo-inducing from the moment she woke up sprawled on her bed, trembling and sick and unable to remember the last handful of hours of her life.

She’s been keeping track ever since. Ticking off each passing day on a calendar. Checking her watch. No more minutes have gone trickling out of her left ear without a trace. No more time has gone and blotted itself from her memories.

It’s good, but it also leaves her with the lingering, jittery feeling that something else might be inexplicably _off._

But still. She just has to keep her head down. No one’s followed up since Fontaine Futuristics crumbled. No one even seems to have realized she was there, even though Tenenbaum’s showed up in the news with a handful of her other associates, visibly working for Ryan - at least before the biologist vanished without much fanfare.

It makes sense. Jessica’s not anyone in the eyes of the law. She just happened to be there in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she kept herself out of sight for the duration of whatever the hell went down at Fontaine’s old headquarters.

There’s no scrubbing the warped screams of Fontaine’s personal splicer vanguard out of her head, or the spattering of crimson against the glass as they ripped countless members of Ryan Security apart with their bare hands.

Jessica shakes herself, skimming hands up and down her arms as she hugs them around herself. The crowd’s packed too dense around her. Atlas’s rallies have started to attract an awful lot of attention. Apparently much of the working-class of Rapture feel the same about the overwhelmingly unbalanced system Ryan built.

Her teeth chatter. Why is she so _cold._

No, this isn’t right. She can’t be here right now, not if she’s in this state. It’s dangerous enough for her to be out and about in the public eye - aiding Atlas’s incipient band of rebels is just likely to cast her further into the spotlight, which is _really_ not a consequence she can afford at this juncture. Sure, she agrees with the man, but it doesn’t mean she’s quite ready and willing to risk everything for his cause. Not now. Not yet. Not when her own neck is on the line, and she’s not ready to believe he’d give a damn about her in return.

Jessica starts squeezing through the crowd, murmuring apologies and excuses as she wends her way around the close-packed clumps of spectators. She’s starting to get where Tim was coming from.

Of course, he’d managed to wriggle out of giving her any means of contacting him. Which doesn’t help either of them, considering he’s one of the few people she’s bothered to get to know in Rapture outside of work. Judging by his general taciturn nature, Jessica’s willing to wager the same goes for him.

Things have changed in Rapture since they last ran into each other. The ADAM flows thick and free from Ryan Industries, supplemented by the twisted revelation of the Little Sisters and what exactly it is that they _do._ The fact that there were probably plenty of them in Fontaine Futuristics the night that it was raided and torn down, the night that she was _there_ makes her sick to her already-roiling stomach.

Ryan’s made his public statements, his assurances that the little girls are treated well and that they’re the “wheels that make Rapture turn,” a necessary sacrifice, but Jessica remains unconvinced. Even shadier, Atlas has yet to address any of the ethics of splicing in his public displays of scorn aimed at Andrew Ryan. Maybe the revolutionary himself succumbs to the impulse every now and again. She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t care.

Rapture is looking less and less like a city, and more and more like a grotesque underwater prison. The Little Sisters wander freely with their wickedly large needles and beady glowing eyes, and their lumbering bodyguards reach out surprisingly gentle hands to lead them along. Big Daddies. One side of Jessica’s mouth curls downward in revulsion. What sick bastard came up with _that_ little colloquialism. She finds herself hoping that Tenenbaum wasn’t responsible for that before she vanished. She hadn’t known the other woman well, not really, not outside of that one day at the old Fontaine building, but regardless - the vibe she’d gotten from her hadn’t spoke of someone willing to do something unnecessarily cruel to _children._

Then again, there’s no proof that Jessica’s all that good at reading people.

The gallows at the center of the Square are still standing, though thankfully the last of the shriveled cadavers swinging from ropes have finally been taken down. All the same, the eerie shape of the nooses hanging naked and knotted draws her stare. Just beneath, the yellow glare of a Big Daddy’s diving suit helmet illuminates the base of the gallows. The thing walks with oddly calculated precision, one hulking step after another, stopping to heft the massive drill welded to its arm every now and again. 

Where one is, the other is never very far off. In the curve of the brute’s shadow she can see the hunched pale blur of a little girl, her hair in a bow, her smock stained, her feet bare as she crouches. Her skin is like marble. Her eyes burn with a weird, emberlike glow.

Jessica shivers and buries her hands deeper into the pockets of her jacket. Ryan can justify the existence of those things all he wants. No one can confirm if those little girls were really orphans, or what in god’s name was done to them to turn them into whatever they are now.

Whether or not they’re even still human is another question entirely.

Her foot scuffs over stone and nearly trips over something else, something faintly moving. It’s not until she sees the spidery shape of an outstretched hand that she realizes it’s a _person._

“Shit,” she mutters, crouching swiftly to hook hands beneath the bedraggled guy’s armpits and haul him upright. He mumbles incoherently and swipes at her as if trying to bat her away, but his eyes are still closed, baggy with shadows. “You okay there, pal?”

“S’what?” One eye cracks open to stare at her, dazed and unfocused.

Jessica redistributes her weight to help prop him up against the nearest vertical surface, which happens to be one of those creepy-as-hell Gatherer’s Garden vending machines. His head thumps against its surface none-too-gently with a conspicuous _thunk_ and Jessica winces.

The machine rattles in response, humming out its too-catchy jingle in a stupidly cheerful, tinny voice:

 _“In the Garden we are growin’, many changes will be flowin’,”_ a little girl’s prerecorded voice sings happily. Jessica’s stomach knots. She kicks the machine with a scowl.

“Shut the hell up.”

 _“If you wanna be amazin’,”_ it continues blithely, _“see the flowers we are raisin’!”_

“Hey. Hey, buddy.” She slaps the man’s face gently. God, but his skin is really worryingly pale, like he’s made of wax. It takes him a long minute to lock eyes with her. “C’mon, you in there, pal?”

“Who’re you,” he says dreamily.

“I’m the person who picked you off the goddamn _floor.”_ His head starts to list to one side and she gives his cheek another tap. “Hey! Come on, stay with me here. What’s going on? What happened to you?”

His gaze drifts. “I was just gonna - ”

He’s in short-sleeves like some idiot, walking around in the city under the sea like there’s insulation in the areas devoted to the working-class. Apollo Square’s chilled, always has been. No wonder the guy’s freezing.

That’s when she notices the needle-marks, swollen and red and pocking the crook of his arm. Jessica releases him with a disappointed grimace. He slides against the Gatherer’s Garden machine without her support and barely manages to catch himself, blinking.

“You’re a splicer,” she says. 

When will she learn to stop poking into other people’s business. Goddamnit, when will she _learn._ The first time it led to Tim wishing he hadn’t met her, the second time it led to -

\- to -

Jessica curls a hand around her middle.

She feels sick to herself and she doesn’t know why.

She steps back. Time to check out. She can’t keep spending time looking after some junkie. He’s probably doomed himself already.

“Wait - wait,” he says, breathless. “Why’d you - why’d you - ”

Jessica rakes a hand through her hair. Her fingers get caught in the tangles.

“Thought you were someone else.”

“No, I - don’t I know you?”

She looks back at the junkie. Thin, ashen, weak chin, eyes that might be gray or blue, a few days’ worth of unshaven stubble chasing down his jaw. He doesn’t strike her as familiar. The shape of his face is pretty unique. 

But then, Jessica’s been having some memory problems in the last few months. She bites her lip and faces him fully.

“Do you?”

“I, uh.” The poor man looks a bit lost for a minute, then he sags against the machine in defeat, head dropping to his chest. “Guess not.”

“You were out looking for a fix,” she says quietly, not without sympathy, “weren’t you.”

It isn’t a question.

The splicer nods miserably.

“I don’t know why I did it,” he says thickly, almost like he’s about to crumble into a drug-induced breakdown. “I mean, in the first place. I knew it would be bad. I knew it would be bad. But there’s - ”

He lifts his hand and, to Jessica’s mingled disbelief and horror, a web of vaguely geometrical craters begin to open up on it, boils puffing out on his skin like swollen balloons. A few insects skitter out over his fingers halfheartedly before scuttling back into the newly-opened honeycomb built into the texture of his hand.

“There’s no coming back from it,” he says listlessly. His eyes are dull, worn, full of resignation. “Is there.”

It isn’t a question either. It’s a statement, a pronouncement of his own fate. He knows he’s doomed. He probably knew it in the back of his mind when he first slid that needle into his own skin.

“Why’d you do it?” says Jessica, head to one side.

What can she say? She’s curious.

Curious and stupid. The traits that get most people killed these days.

He shakes his head. “I didn’t know what else to do.” He makes a soft hiccuping noise in the back of his throat, like a static chuckle torn loose, ragged and completely devoid of any humor whatsoever. “Nowhere to go but up, right?”

He starts slipping down the length of the machine again, and this time it doesn’t look like he’s about to halt himself. Jessica moves back to him, one hand going to his shoulder to keep him on his feet. He sways, looking slightly sick.

“Is that what you thought when you came here?” She smiles. It’s one part indulgent scorn, two parts sympathy.

“What _Alex_ thought.” He leans into her support unconsciously and she lets him. It’s not like the man weighs all that much; he’s little more than skin and bone. “It was _his_ idea. I go to him over it, he gives me some plasmid that shoots _bees_ like that’ll fix anything.”

Something about that name scratches the contours of memory. Jessica flinches as though fending off a chill.

“Alex?” she says.

“Kralie.” He shrugs one shoulder, his tone twisting into something bitter. “Maybe you’ve heard of him. I hear he hangs around Cohen a _lot_ these days.”

Why does that sound _familiar._ Something about it itches at her like a scab she wants to pick but she can’t for the life of her peel back what might be on the other side.

The poor spliced-up bastard is looking lost and listless as ever. Jessica hesitates.

Tim warned her about things like that, things that bubble and claw at your head begging to be let out, things repressed through no fault of her own. His advice had been to run the opposite direction if she wanted to forget. But she _doesn’t_ want to forget. She didn’t get here by dodging her demons, no matter how tempting the thought is.

No. Tim’s wrong.

That clinches it. She wraps a firm hand around the junkie’s arm and gives him a tug.

“C’mon,” she says, flashing him an uneven, tired smile. “I’ll take you to my place. It’ll be okay.”

If she wasn’t set on her course of action before, the look of relief on the poor man’s face would’ve been the final straw. He looks so taken aback, so openly and _painfully_ grateful that it’s hard to look at.

Bad idea, maybe.

Almost definitely.

But Jessica needs to know.

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**ARTEMIS SUITES - November 25, 1958**

“So what’s your name?” asks Jessica as she jerks at the door that she knows has a tendency to stick in the frame. It stutters open and she helps the would-be splicer inside.

“J - um, Jay,” he says.

“Jessica.” She yanks the door shut behind her. “Oh, uh, word of warning? Place is a real rat-trap.” And lucky her, she can still afford her own miniature corner space. It’s cramped and smaller than the average apartment in the tenement, but it’s hers, completely and wholly, and she doesn’t have to share it with half a dozen families. Of course, the additional cost for that had been notably _ridiculous_ in compensation. Figures.

Jay stands in the middle of the floor, blinking in apparent amazement at the state of the place.

“You live here?” he says faintly.

Jessica shrugs. “It’s cheap.”

She tosses her keys onto the counter-like table and shrugs off her jacket, then quickly reaches out to stabilize Jay before he faceplants in the middle of the living room.

“Okay. Shower,” she says firmly. “Hope you don’t mind cold water. That’s all we get over here.”

Jay looks at her slowly in dawning horror. “What?”

“It’ll help you sober up.”

She steers him to the door into the communal bathroom space. “No one should be in. It’s a workday. Towels behind the eye-washing stations.”

“Um. What.”

“It’s a _worker’s_ residential area. What’d you expect?”

Jay looks at her blankly.

Jessica folds her arms. “I’m not gonna help you _shower.”_

“Right,” he says hastily. “Right. Sorry. Yeah. I wouldn’t - that would be, uh.” He hovers, hand over the doorknob. “I’m gonna go and. Do that.”

“Good plan.”

Jessica sighs as she drops into the nearest chair and pushes the hair from her face. She doesn’t typically play Good Samaritan, not really. She’s not in the habit of it. But she _is_ in the habit of pursuing things that need to be pursued, like the memories torn from her head those months ago. She hasn’t forgotten. That’s not something someone just lets slide from their skull. Maybe Tim’s content to let those blind gaps of nothing sit there festering away, but she’s not. She needs to find out what happened to her. And Jay’s going to help her do it.

And who knows. Maybe she can help him if he helps her. Maybe she can nudge him off the self-destructive path he’s clearly set himself on with Alex’s help.

_Alex._

Has she seen anything he’s been in, or contributed to? Jay mentioned Cohen, but Jessica’s not what anyone would call an avid fan of the man. She hasn’t even been to Fort Frolic outside of routine assignments to fix whatever problem is wrong with their heating or cooling systems or whatever. Is Kralie big enough to land his name on a few posters?

That might not even be it. There’s no way to tell. She can’t retrace her steps when it happened months ago. It’s just that Jay’s the first lead she’s had on this _since_ then, and she’s no detective. She fixes pipes and broken heating systems for a living in an underwater city, and is criminally underpaid in doing so.

There’s the quiet hiss of water next door. Jessica gets up and heads for the communal kitchen area. If she’s lucky there might still be coffee somewhere.

By the time Jay wanders back in, toweling his hair dry in slow, ponderous swipes, there’s a mug of (admittedly cold) caffeine on the table. It’s of dubious quality, but most things are this side of Apollo Square. She’s lucky she didn’t have to go scrounging for another pot of grounds somewhere. There’d been several bottles of Chechnya Vodka piled nearby, several unopened and unclaimed, but she’d left them where they were without a second thought. The last thing Jay needs is _more_ shit in his system.

Jessica doesn’t look up as she peruses a stack of old papers for the name she’s now holding in her head. _Kralie. Kralie. Kralie._ But there’s nothing in the recent days, nothing in the news bearing that name.

“Better?” It’s only when it takes him a long moment to answer that she looks askance at her unexpected guest.

“Uh.” Jay scrutinizes his hand as if it’s a particularly intriguing foreign object. Something buzzes faintly, but the skin remains whole. “Can I get back to you on that?”

Jessica almost snorts aloud as she leans back in her chair. “There’s coffee.”

“Thanks.” Jay lowers himself carefully into the chair, wincing. He frowns as he drags the cup closer with the scrape of cheap ceramic over even cheaper wood. “Why, um.” He doesn’t look up as he stirs the tarry contents dubiously. “Why are you being so, um, so, uh - ”

“Nice?”

Jay shrugs one shoulder, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

Jessica recognizes the look of someone who’s regretting his phraseology. Tim practically radiates the same discomfort on a daily basis. Or at least, he did those few times she ran into him.

“Call me curious.” She props her chin on one hand as she leans closer.

Jay regards her warily. “About what?”

“Alex Kralie.”

The tremor runs down her spine at an alarming frequency and her whole body stiffens.

There’s _definitely_ something about the name that her body won’t let her forget.

But _what._

“What do you - what do you wanna know?” says Jay, the suspicion in his tone deepening.

Jessica runs one fingertip over the fragile wood of her fragile table and wonders how long it would take for a splinter to get jammed in there under her nail. She digs her thumb into the surface with an abrupt viciousness, sinking hard keratin into flaking wood.

“Start from the beginning.”


	11. [ there are no strings ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small warnings for some period-appropriate ableism in this chapter, though I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This chapter also contains drug use, violence, needles/injections, and emotional distress/dissociation.

**FORT FROLIC - November 26, 1958**

“Jesus,” says Kyle, lazily uninvested as is his wont, “what crawled up _your_ ass and died?”

Alex sighs and swirls his Old Harbinger until the ice cubes clink gently against the glass.

“Amy,” he says glumly, and downs the remainder of his drink in one go.

Kyle whistles between his teeth. “She called it off?”

Alex can’t speak for the alcohol burning a searing trail down his throat, so he simply nods. Kyle leans against the varnished wood counter of the Cocktail Lounge with his cheek propped up on a clenched fist, two fingers digging into his temple with a thumb hooked under his jaw, the picture of absolute indolence.

“That’s rough,” he says, not without _sympathy_ but without much commitment to the phrase. “She had enough of your sleeping around, then?”

Alex’s knuckles pop as his hand closes into a tight fist.

“I don’t blame her.”

“Save it, Fitzpatrick.”

“Look, I’m just saying, she had a valid complaint - ”

Alex stands so swiftly that his chair clatters loudly to the floor. He glowers at Fitzpatrick, who looks at him innocently, the complete _bastard._

“It’s Atlas,” he says, disgusted. “She fell in with Atlas.”

The room quiets, the name striking silence like a pall. The scattered murmurs of exterior conversation lapse into nothing as the Lounge's other patrons glance furtively in Alex’s direction, all sound rendered inert but for the soft crackle of the radio in the corner.

Fitzpatrick’s expression clears, alarm momentarily flitting across his features before he rearranges them into something expressly unconcerned.

“My condolences,” he says at last.

Alex snorts, short and derisive, kicking the chair out of his way. The bartender clears her throat pointedly, but he elects to ignore her.

“She’s not _dead,_ Kyle.”

“Might as well be, if Ryan gets his hands on her.” Kyle sips delicately at whatever greenish alcoholic liquid he’s drinking and regards it thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re doing an excellent impression of someone who is.”

Alex thumbs through his wallet and throws the requisite amount of bills onto the counter, scowling. He brushes past Kyle and into the darkened, bustling hubbub of the Fort without farewell.

He runs fingers through his hair. He’s jumpy, jittery, like an addict desperate for a fix. But he’s no addict. He’s no splicer, no strung-out junkie, not like those tumor-riddled nutcases clamoring over the streets of the Drop. He’s better than that. He’s fine.

Amy’s not around to tie him to anything, anymore. Nothing’s keeping him from letting the ADAM flow freely into his veins and he won’t deny it any longer: he indulges. He spends openly. He gets an incredible high from the plasmids that are now being manufactured and released at unimaginable rates under Ryan’s new management. Even Fontaine couldn’t get new samples out to the public this quickly. It’s heavenly - or it would be, if there weren’t that dark reminder niggling in the back of his head, that Amy would always look at him with guilt and grief in her gaze and then turn away with the disappointment starkly evident in every tiny, short movement.

She made her choice. She fell in with Atlas’s lot, bought all his propaganda and lapped it up hungrily like he was the dealer and she was buying. Alex feels the corner of his lip curl into an unconscious sneer. What’s a terrorist like that got to offer her, he can’t help but ask. She had everything down here. A nice place in Olympus Heights, a guy who’d buy her anything, a guy who was well on his way to climbing to the top of Cohen’s disciples. He’s getting closer every day, he can feel it.

Rude is what it is. Ungrateful.

He doesn’t realize he’s parked himself in front of the nearest Circus of Values until the white-faced clown chortles merrily in his direction with its horrible, insufferable tinny laugh. He glares at it but feeds in his bills obediently, chewing anxiously on the wall of his cheek as he waits for the receptive _clunk_ of an EVE hypo hitting metal. He needs to hit up, and soon. His veins feel dry as powder; no wonder he’s been biting everyone’s head off today. One shot of the blue, and he’ll be right and normal again.

He’s been spending more and more time in his apartment in Cameron Suites, jabbing himself full of needles, reclining with hands fisted into the sheets as a fresh plasmid sinks into his system. He feels better there. Safer. The four walls can get horribly claustrophobic, but when his skin starts itching all he has to do is slip another hypo from his dresser drawer and let the ADAM take the wheel for a bit. It’s not a bad life, here in Rapture. Even if Amy told him in whispered undertone that she didn’t believe in the ethos of the place anymore, and that Atlas was the future of Rapture, he still has the rising stardom of Sander Cohen, he still has Fitzpatrick to comment idly on his latest job developments, he still has enough money to get by, he still has ADAM, he still has standing, and he’s even managed to get that Merrick guy off his back. He’s alive, and even better, he’s thriving. He’s _fine._

Yet even in the seclusion of his room and the warmth of ADAM coursing through his blood, sometimes there’s the scratch of some nameless impending doom, quietly insistent in the back of his mind. Sometimes he feels cold and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Sometimes he feels eyes on him, even though his room has but one window that looks out over the seafloor, and sometimes no matter how much he scrubs his hands over his arms and hunches over himself he can’t stop shivering.

Alex buries his hands into the pockets of his coat. Speaking of cold, he’s already starting to catch a bit of a chill. He just wants to get home. He just wants to get home and splice up a bit and get some sleep. It takes him an embarrassingly long time to fish the keys from his pockets with fingers rendered numb and clumsy, and even once they’re jangling reassuringly in his hands, he finds he can’t use them to open his door, because two people are already standing outside of it.

“What d’you want, Merrick,” Alex growls, narrowing in on the face of the man he recognizes. The woman is vaguely familiar, but he doesn’t want to think about that. He’ll address the guy he knows _how_ to address: with a healthy dose of dismissive scorn.

“We need to talk, Kralie.” The woman speaks first, arms folded across her chest. 

Alex snorts as he tries without success to elbow Merrick aside. “Do I even _know_ you?”

Merrick stiffens and braces a hand against Alex’s door as the other man jams keys into the lock and tries to open it. Christ, when did _Merrick_ grow a spine?

“Get out of my damn _way,_ Merrick,” he growls, spitting the man’s name with a low intensity redolent of an underlying threat.

“Alex,” says Merrick, and he looks fragile and porcelain-pale as he always does but there’s a tremor in his voice Alex can’t put a name to, “we gotta talk.”

“You did something to me,” says the woman. She stabs a vicious finger in Alex’s direction, lip curling back into a snarl. “Something I - I can’t _remember.”_

Oh.

Oh, _shit._

 _Now_ he remembers her. She made the mistake of approaching him on a bad day, a real bad day, and now she’s back to sort out what it is he _did._ He could Hypnotize the both of them, send them away (the ADAM’s prickling in his hands, his bones, the pads of his fingertips but his veins are full of powder and the hypo is still thrust unhelpfully into the depths of his pocket), but that wouldn’t solve the problem. It’d just shove it aside for a while.

If there’s one thing Alex prides himself on, it’s finishing his own goddamn business. He doesn’t leave loose ends. He ties everything off, nice and neat.

He grunts at the sanctimonious pair of them and kneads at his brow with a pinched thumb and forefinger.

“Fine,” he mutters. “Come in. Just - let me sit down.”

The woman narrows her eyes, clearly unimpressed, but Merrick nudges her and whispers something Alex’s tired ears don’t catch. He doesn’t care. He unlocks his door and steps inside.

“Do me a favor and don’t make yourselves at home,” he says dryly, sweeping a demonstrative hand at his apartment’s cluttered interior. He keeps meaning to clean the place. He may as well be living in squalor.

The woman whistles quietly, her eyes wide. She’s probably never been in a place this nice before. One look at her uniform pegs her as some kind of engineering lackey, maybe one of the geniuses who work the generators down in Hephaestus. That’d really be something. That’d also make her someone he likely doesn’t want to piss off.

Well, too late for that now.

Merrick and his accomplice are still standing starstruck in his living room, so Alex seizes the window while it’s still available to him. 

“Gimme a minute.” 

He shoulders his way into the bathroom and slips the vial of EVE from his pocket. He surveys it at eye level, noting the thick glow of the liquid. He uncaps the needle and taps at it to pop out the air pockets. This’ll clear everything up. This’ll make things right. One hit of this and he’ll be adjusted enough to deal with the load of shit that’s just been heaped on his doorstep.

He hasn’t gotten any further than rolling up his shirtsleeve when he hears a firm rap on the door.

 _”Now,_ Kralie,” says the woman’s voice from outside.

“Give me a _minute,”_ he snaps.

Christ, gotta make this quick. No time to savor it. He slams the needle into the thick vein in his wrist and squeezes the pump. Alex lets his eyes drift close as the rush takes him. It’s goddamn angelic, always is. He never gets used to it, and he nopes he never does. It’s like feeling electric.

He loses himself in the daze, chock-full of plasmids and practically goddamn invincible. If they keep pushing him, he’s more than well-equipped to push back. He can make their lives _hell._ He clenches and unclenches his hands as the thrill of the injection hums through his blood.

That’s when the door rattles in its frame.

He jumps, his hip bangs loudly against the sink, and the spell is broken.

“Open the _door,_ Alex!”

Is that Jay? Why’s he here again? Alex hisses his annoyance between his teeth as he jerks the door open and glowers at his unwanted guests. The woman has perched on his bed, arms folded like a disapproving teacher.

“What?” he says.

“You’ve been in there for half an _hour,”_ says Merrick, clearly aghast. “You wouldn’t open up, and the door was locked. I thought you were _dead_ or something.”

Alex snorts. “That’s rich, Merrick, even for you.”

Merrick frowns, looking vaguely offended. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You figure it out.”

“You were splicing in there.” The woman speaks at last, her eyes drawn to the empty hypo still clutched in his hand. Alex swears under his breath. He’d forgotten to discard the used-up shell of his latest high. “Just like you were the day I - ”

Her eyes widen.

Shit.

“Shut up,” snaps Alex.

“The day I _met_ you,” she finishes in a rush. _”God,_ that’s what I couldn’t remember! You wiped that - how’d you _do_ that - ”

Merrick looks between the two of them, confusion flitting over his sleep-deprived features.

“Alex?” he says, tentative and questioning. “You don’t look so good.”

Since when does _Merrick_ care? Alex stares at him blankly, uncomprehending.

“Why’re you here?” he says at last, tiredly, having made the command decision to cut the bullshit and narrow this encounter down to the one factor he recognizes: the _want_ for something. Jay’s looking more and more like he’d really rather not be here, leading Alex to believe that the woman is the one who forced the location of the apartment out of him.

“I knew I remembered you,” she murmurs, still caught between amazement and horror. “I _knew_ I did. You erased everything, somehow. You must know - you’ve got to know Tim, don’t you?”

Alex raises his eyebrows. “Who?”

“Tim.” She raises a hand to the side of her head and makes a brief, equivocal gesture. “Kind of on the shorter side, smokes a lot, sideburns? The memory loss - I’m not the only one you’ve done that to, am I?”

“Look,” says Alex shortly, “I don’t know what you’re _implying,_ really,” - a lie, as he knows _precisely_ what she’s implying but doesn’t care for it in the slightest - “but that was a one-time thing, all right? I get that you’re upset, but I was kind of having a rough day at the time and - ”

 _”Upset,”_ the woman repeats, her tone flat with disbelief. “I don’t think that really _covers_ it.”

“Right, okay.” Alex barely resists the urge to roll his eyes. “I _get_ it. So why bother dragging Merrick’s ass here if all you needed was, I’m guessing, directions?”

Merrick shifts in place, as though uncomfortable with being directly addressed. He’s already positioned himself in the farthest possible corner of the room, as far as he can get from the swelling confrontation. Alex, for his part, doesn’t even spare the other man a glance. He knows what he’ll see, what he’s seen a dozen times before. A scrappy little wisp of a man, ragged, scrawny, insomniac, and painfully out of place among Alex’s scattered belongings. 

“You know him,” she says, hard and cold, “and you don’t know me. You might not’ve even opened the door otherwise.”

“You’re damn right I wouldn’t’ve.” Doubly so now that he knows the baggage she intends to drag across his floor.

“And it’s _Jessica.”_ She folds her arms, lifting her chin. “Since apparently you’re not interested in asking.”

“What?”

“My name. It’s Jessica.”

“Great,” says Alex. “I don’t care.”

He catches Merrick looking at him oddly from the corner of his eye, and what little patience he has left abruptly runs out.

 _”What?”_ he barks, and Jessica jumps at the sudden ferocity of the word.

“You’re _shaking,”_ says Jay, and he stretches one of those too-thin, too-bony, too-pale hands out but the tips of his fingers have barely grazed the skin of Alex’s wrist when he reacts, fiercely, uncontrollably, and completely on instinct.

To be honest, he’s not quite sure what happens next. 

There’s a blur, a gasp, a streak of blue, a shower of sparks. Jay’s frail little body slams into Alex’s dresser with the crack of splintering wood.

“Jay!” Jessica shrieks the other man’s name like a prayer, her voice climbing several octaves in her fervor. _”Jay!”_

Immediately, she’s at the huddled shape’s side. The air is stale with the scent of ozone. Jay quivers, his body twitching spasmodically with each jolt of electricity as it shivers over his skin.

Alex sags against the opposite wall, watching blue sparks leap from his fingertips with a dull realization pounding in his chest. Every hair on his arms stands on end as the air around him crackles with a menacing charge.

There’s only one thing with the power to do what he just did.

His hands tremble as the electric blue pulsing of voltage in his veins fades, and the static of Electro Bolt washes into nothing.

“Shit,” he says in toneless resignation. “Shit.”

“What the hell did you _do_ to him?” Jessica rounds on him, her expression falling somewhere between furious and distraught. “He didn’t even _do_ anything!”

“I didn’t mean to,” he says in stuttering protest, and Jessica reaches to seize him by the front of his shirt but he quickly sidesteps out of her path, hands raised with palms out. “Don’t - ”

“No wonder,” says Jessica, her tone thick with disgust. “No wonder you did whatever you did to me. If you can’t _abide_ scum like us _touching_ you - ”

“It’s not like that!” Alex retreats further. He gropes for the door, now unable to help the panicky note in his voice. “I didn’t mean - ”

“Heard you the first time.” She won’t stop advancing, and again that unshakeable _urge_ seizes him and his reaction is unprecedented and absolute. A burst of wind gusts into her, hurtling her back.

“Stay _back,”_ says Alex desperately. He flinches as her head cracks sickeningly against the wall.

She slides to the floor, unmoving.

“Shit - ”

No, no, what _is_ this, what is he _doing._ He looks at his hands in confusion, unease, horror, stares at the miniature vortexes spinning lazily across the palms. He clutches at his head, hunching back into the corner. The walls are looming over him again. There’s that coldness again, that undeniable tightness in his chest, the feeling of something _watching._

What’s happening to him?

What’s doing this?

The ADAM - no, no it can’t be the ADAM. It can’t be. It _can’t_ be. It’s just making whatever he’s doing a lot worse, but he can’t possibly cut himself off from it, not _now._

“What…” whispers a voice, faint and cracked around the edges. “What did you do.”

Jay peels him out from the wreckage of Alex’s dresser, from the tumble of dusty shirts stained blue with hidden troves of EVE, his eyes awash with confusion and hurt.

“I didn’t,” says Alex, hoarsely. “I didn’t mean - ”

“You hit me.” He doesn’t sound accusatory, or even angry. He just sounds - puzzled. Like he was hurt more by the _idea_ of the act rather than the act itself.

“Jay, I - ”

“I can’t feel - ” Jay’s eyes begin to glaze. He’s trembling visibly between the shattered wood and glass and torn cloth. “Oh god.”

Alex can’t think of anything to say.

He can’t look away from Jessica, from _Jay,_ from their uncharacteristically still bodies, his throat taut with fear and guilt.

Grayed-out flickers of news reports hum behind his eyelids with every blink, reports of splicers gone rogue and wild and broken, peering hungrily at Little Sisters with crazed eyes, their flesh sunken and sponged with tumors. It starts with unprovoked acts of violence. That’s how it always starts. He’s heard enough of Ryan’s public service announcements, read enough reports in the _Tribune,_ to know that’s how it begins.

He shudders deeply, a chill burrowing beneath his shoulders and around his spine.

He can’t stay here.

He can’t.

Not like this.

He clutches the doorknob between shaking, nerveless fingers, pulls the door open, and flees without a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a tiny nod to the "Next to Normal" musical in this one.


	12. [ the pareidolic dilemma ]

**NEPTUNE’S BOUNTY - November 29, 1958**

The months have dragged past, and there’s no change. The blank splotches in his memories persist, the days and nights still flicker by with hours lost in between, and all Tim can do is keep his head down and grit his teeth and hope that no one notices. He’s on thin enough ice with his job security as it is. Missing a full week unannounced will do that.

At least Fontaine’s gone, well and truly. Not a whisper of the man except from paranoid freaks like Wilkins, and everyone’s attention has been soaked up by the new accented revolutionary in town. No one’s really sure as to where Atlas came from or what his endgame is. He paints such a vibrant image of the stalwart boy scout that no one seems to want to question it.

Tim, for his part, can’t bring himself to buy a word of it. It sounds too good to be true, and in Rapture there are only two types of people: roaches and opportunists. Guess which category he belongs to.

His shift’s just closing up when he catches a glimpse of something moving in the corner of his eye, something suspiciously human-shaped. Tim frowns, trailing after it. No one else should be on the premises but him at this point. All his other co-workers have gone home, content to not be overworking themselves and pulling overtime every chance they get, secure in the knowledge that they’re not about to be fired for up and disappearing for an entire week.

He steps back to wait for a Big Daddy to finish helping its tiny charge into one of the hidey-holes that Ryan’s people had installed throughout the city. Tim takes care not to look too hard at either one of them. There’s no telling, these days, what a Big Daddy might interpret as a threat. The brute rumbles something that might be construed as a goodbye before clanking off with its ponderous, lumbering gait. Tim shudders as he watches it go. Two months to get used to the things, and he’s still not accustomed to seeing them have free rein of the city.

“Gotta - gotta keep moving - ”

And _those_ are definitely the sounds of someone who shouldn’t be here.

Tim creeps closer, rounding the stacks of boxes he’s just tied down to be shipped to god-knows-where, when he stops. He stoops swiftly, rummaging through the nearest toolbox. He curses and sucks at his thumb when he pricks it on a nail, then finally retrieves a hefty-looking wrench. He weighs it in his palm for a moment, considering, then holds it ready in front of him as he advances. The worn boards creak beneath each step, but there’s no helping it. With any luck, the person in question will be too distracted to hear him coming.

“Who’s there?” he calls. There’s no erasing the subtle tremble in his tone.

“Can’t stop - can’t stop - ”

The wrench quivers as Tim’s hands begin to shake. He grips it two-handed. “Come out!”

“Footsteps - there’re footsteps - ”

Tim swings the wrench back, ready to bring it crashing into the side of someone’s head, but he never gets the chance. He steps around the last of the crates and promptly gets the legs taken out from under him as something brings him down in a hard tackle. His head thunks dully against the wood, stars popping erratically over his vision. The wrench skids from his hands with a low metallic scrape. He gropes for it, uselessly, fingertips grazing the rusted red metal but unable to get a solid grip on it.

A fist is drawn back, and Tim rolls away. He hears the wet _thump_ of flesh hitting wood and the subsequent hiss of pain, and kicks out. His feet connect with something soft. The weight of another body on top of his abruptly disappears, and he scrambles upright again.

“Get _back,”_ he says, wobbling, gripping at the nearest solid object for support. “You’re not supposed to be here!”

“I’m not - ”

The other man huddles on the ground where Tim kicked him, one hand curled protectively around his midriff. A pair of half-shattered glasses is perched unsteadily over his nose, his jacket hanging in tatters from his worryingly thin frame.

Some of the tension in Tim’s stance drains as he looks on in increasing confusion. What is this guy _doing_ here? He’s hardly any kind of threat. He got the drop on Tim, sure, but he had the element of surprise on his side. It’s not like he’s got anything else going for him.

“Sir?” He takes a tentative step closer. “Sir, are you okay?”

What is he _doing_ here and why is Tim the only one to greet him? This isn’t Tim’s job and it really shouldn’t _ever_ be. He’s horrendous enough at social interaction as it is.

“I’m,” says the other man faintly. He stares off into the middle distance for a long minute, so long that it’s becoming plausible that he’s forgotten Tim’s presence entirely.

His stare levels off, and abruptly snaps to meet Tim’s inquisitive stare. Tim flinches back so sharply in alarm that his shoulder bangs into one of the stacks of crates. The muscles tighten and throb in protest, and he winces.

“What year is it?” says the other man very intently, like it’s the most important question in the universe.

“Um,” says Tim.

“No,” says the man. He brings a hand up as if to shield his eyes from some invisible bright source of light. “No. It doesn’t matter. I’d just forgotten.”

He’s shivering so deeply that his teeth are chattering. Tim regards him from beneath lowered brows.

“Let me get you to McDonagh’s,” he says, enunciating each word with care since the intruder seems pretty lost in his own little world. This isn’t Tim’s business, not really, but he can’t just _leave_ the guy on company premises in good faith that he won’t fuck anything up, especially in his questionable state. McDonagh’s can at least hold him for the night. All Tim has to do is hope that he’s got a few bills in his pockets.

He reaches out slowly, but the other man’s hand closes sharply around his wrist.

_”Don’t touch me!”_

Tim barely ducks in time to avoid the roar of flame licking hungrily over his head. He throws himself flat against the ground, panting, the air crackling with the smell of singed hair. For once in his life, he can be grateful the docks of Neptune’s Bounty are too heavy and waterlogged with saltwater for much of the surroundings to be flammable. The inferno dies down as quickly as it began, leaving little more than blackened scorch marks in its wake.

“What the _hell?”_ he manages over the din. The other man’s arm retracts, but Tim catches the ripple of fire boiling off over his skin, angry reddish pustules glistening as they hang off his arms like overripe fruit. “I’m trying to _help!”_

“No. _No.”_ The man whirls on the spot, addressing an invisible person with a desperate note in his voice. “Stop it. _Stop it!_ That’s not what I do, that’s not what I - ”

Another scream, another gust of fire.

This time, the ghostly image of something awful and tall and spindly is imprinted across the pillars of flame.

The breath chokes in Tim’s throat.

He hasn’t seen that in a long time, not since -

He reaches for it out of instinct, fingers outstretched, almost enough to graze the crisp black lines of its suit, the sickly white skin stretched over its faceless features.

In the next blink, it’s gone.

He can’t think. He can’t _speak._ He can’t do anything but stare numbly at the spot where the apparition once was. Assuming it was even there at all?

“You can see it?” The other man stares at Tim in haggard amazement, the wild terror in his eyes fading into intrigue. “You can see it too?”

Tim can’t speak, his jaw locked wide and open as he gapes at the ashen silhouette seared into his retinas. Tall, spidery, stretching on and on and on.

He shakes his head, and the other man’s shoulders sag.

“I knew it.”

“Look.” Tim recovers his voice at the same moment that he recalls his original intention to bring the trespasser someplace that’s else before his boss catches wind of this whole encounter. “I gotta get you outta here, all right? Before someone else notices. You’re not supposed to _be_ here.”

“I just need a place,” he says quietly, distantly, apparently speaking to the empty air, “somewhere I can go. It’s not safe.”

“Right, okay.” Tim has no idea how to be soothing in this scenario. Is ‘soothing’ even in his arsenal of socially-conscious tactics? Somehow he finds that doubtful. “I can take you there, all right?”

Whatever this guy’s been through, it’s really shook him up, and he’s a splicer on top of it. No wonder he’s downward-spiraling; he’s probably low on whatever plasmids he’s gone and pumped into his system.

That doesn’t explain, though, how that thing swam up behind him like a ghost and how he _knew_ what it _was_ like it was anything other than a figment of Tim’s overactive, sleep-deprived childhood imagination.

“I can’t let you stay here.” The guy is still staring dully off into the middle distance, so he tries again. “You gotta get out. Please.”

He shakes his head once, as though trying to jog his memory, and his glazed-eye stare finally latches onto Tim.

“I know you saw it,” he says sharply, abruptly sounding a hell of a lot more lucid than he did two seconds ago.

“What?” For all his desperation to keep his job, Tim takes a step back.

“I saw your face.” The weird shifting light thrown by the reflection of the lamps off the water’s surface throws his face into gaunt relief, the lenses of his glasses glinting. “You _recognized_ it.”

“I didn’t - ”

_”Stop lying to me.”_

He doesn’t shout, but he doesn’t have to. His voice takes on an unearthly quality, low and ground-out and menacing, his head lowering.

“What is it?” he growls. “What do you know about it? How do you get it out of my _head?”_

“Look, okay.” Tim steps back again, raising both hands in what he can only hope is a vaguely calming, placating manner. “I’ll tell you what I know, all right? But right now, you need to come with me. I need to get you outta here. Okay?” 

Anything to get this guy _away_ from his work place. He needs to keep certain aspects of his life separate, and it’s not something as simple as the disorder of his pease mixing with his porridge. This is just something he never _touches,_ period, and the fact that someone else might possibly have the same problems he’s dealt with his entire _life_ is, well.

It’s a relief.

And it’s terrifying.

The other man holds his gaze for a long minute, and then he nods.

“Okay.”

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**NEPTUNE’S BOUNTY; THE FIGHTING MCDONAGH’S TAVERN - November 29, 1958**

“You really don’t look so good, buddy.”

The other man says nothing, continuing to stare at his hands and watch myriad patterns hum faintly across the skin of his palms. Tim keeps his distance. The man’s looking pretty well glutted on plasmids, and that’s not the sort of person he wants to piss off. Even if Tim was, unsurprisingly, the only one with the money on hand to pay for the room in the first place.

The room is small, cramped, smelling far too strongly of salt and fish and alcohol. Tim, for his part, is more than used to the reek at this point, but his unexpected charge doesn’t seem to have adjusted. He keeps wrinkling his nose as though trying to drive the scent from his nostrils.

Good fucking luck on that one, buddy.

A cursory look at the clothes beneath his coat hints that he’s a bit more well-off than his ragged status would suggest, his shirt finely-tailored if now more than a bit worn and frayed around the edges. What’s a tall-and-mighty guy like him doing in a rotting fish-hole like Neptune’s Bounty? Did he splice himself up too far and wander off in pursuit of a little extra ADAM? It’s possible at this point, but it still doesn’t explain his familiarity with the shape of Tim’s nightmares.

This isn’t typical, not for Tim. This isn’t _him._ He doesn’t give a rat’s ass what the rich sorts do with themselves in their spare time, much less reach out to help someone who’s having something of a bad time.

“How about we both start from the beginning?” says Tim, adopting his smooth, controlled workman’s voice. “I’m Tim.”

“Alex,” the other man grunts. “Kralie.”

“All right.” Tim seats himself carefully on a crate roughly opposite to the bed, which he chose to keep free for the guy who looks like he needs it. He perched on it obligingly as soon as Tim got the keys to enter one of the rooms upstairs, but he still doesn’t look to be registering much about his surroundings. “Alex. You wanna tell me why someone like you ended up in Neptune’s Bounty?”

“That’s not what we’re talking about,” says Alex harshly. He’s wringing his hands, running them up and down his arms, shivering. “We’re talking about you. You and how you know about that - thing.”

“It’s just a dumb nightmare I had as a kid,” says Tim. “That’s all.”

“Bullshit.” A bright tongue of flame skips from Alex’s fingertips and fizzles out in mid air, but he keeps rubbing at his arms, apparently unaware of it. “It’s real. I know it is.”

“That’s not possible - ”

“You know what’s not possible?” And the other man is suddenly shouting, hands clamped down on the edge of the bed with the knuckles blanching as he fixes his stare on Tim with a vicious intensity. “The fact that something like that can _exist._ The fact that it can tell you to _do_ things, make you do things, things you don’t wanna do, things that, that - ”

Tim’s heart thumps painfully in his chest, his mouth dry. “What are you saying?” he says hoarsely.

He knows precisely what Alex is saying.

“I’m saying it’s in my _head!”_ He fists fingers into his hair, looking almost deranged as he hunches over himself. “It - it follows me around, it makes me _do_ things, not for ADAM, not for any other reason besides that it - it _likes_ it.”

If it were any other person, any other line of logic, Tim would put it down on being a splicer too far gone. But there’d been, barely a few feet away, the distorted whisper of a Little Sister, and if Alex were anything like those other hopped-up junkies he’d have lunged after that child-shaped thing in a heartbeat, the instant he heard its frail little voice.

Instead, however -

Instead the man is tearing himself apart over something that Tim for years had told himself was little more than a hallucination, that the doctors and hospitals put down as a paranoid delusion. He learned to lock it down, act like it wasn’t there. He’s sane, Doc, see? He’s perfectly average. He’s _normal._

Twenty-something years of hard denial is a lot to unlearn in a few minutes to an hour, but everything already feels like it’s unraveling, everything torn out from beneath his feet. There’s no solidity or trust that those hallucinations were ever _really_ hallucinations. The lost time gone missing from his head could be anything, anything.

No wonder Alex is losing his grip.

Anyone would.

 _Tim_ would.

He might be already.

“Alex,” he says. He crouches in front of him, speaking rapidly, barely allowing the other man to process. “Alex, listen to me. I’ve been seeing this thing, hearing it _talking_ to me, since I was a kid. I don’t know what it is. I always thought it wasn’t real, that it was all in my head. And that’s the _truth._ It’s not real, Alex. It’s _not real.”_

Alex shakes his head, still gripping his own skull with an alarming ferocity.

“It’s real.”

“It’s a _delusion.”_ Tim’s voice cracks in his frustration. “Alex, let me _help_ you.”

Can he help? Is he anything to this man? _Should_ he be?

The possibility that that _thing_ could be out there, looming, waiting, lurking, is almost too much bear.

Lock it down.

Lock it _down,_ Tim. You’re better than this. You’re stable. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s never been real.

It’s not real.

_“It’s not real,” says the doctors._

_“It’s not real,” says his mother._

_“It’s not real,” says the doctors._

_“It’s not real,” says his mother._

_“It’s not real,” says the doctors._

_“It’s not real,” says his mother._

“It’s not real,” says Tim, firmly.

“It’s - ”

Alex glances up and pales, his eyes widening in abject horror.

“It’s _here.”_

Tim half-turns at the same moment Alex screams, thin and hoarse and terrified. Something reaches to him. A chill wraps around his heart.

And that's when -

When

everything

becomes


	13. [ on the brink of nothing ]

**ARTEMIS SUITES - December 1st, 1958**

Bad call on their part. _Bad call._ He should never have left, he should never have done any of it. He never should have told her. If he could just go back - change everything, make it so it never happened -

Alex’s apartment was a wreck, the walls smashed through, the ceiling leaking water and trickles of crushed plaster. The door gaped open, and Jay reached for her, for Jessica, limp and still with a thin streak of blood running down from her dark mat of hair.

He’d reached for her, and then he’d stopped, and then he’d reached for the ADAM.

He could see it, red and crystalline and glistening between the mess of Alex’s dust-coated shirts and slacks. It was just _lying_ there, the bottles bright and unbroken, the thick crimson liquid floating and _waiting_ for a vein and he was feeling so weak and jittery and he’d just been thrown by a blast of electricity to his middle, so it was just so _reasonable_ that he make himself as strong as possible to help Jessica, right? He’d have to help her out, and to do that he’d have to help himself first, and it was such an easy rationalization and the needle had slipped so unresistingly into his skin and it had been blissful, it had been better than his first hit, it had been heaven -

And now it still feels like there’s static crawling beneath his skin. He had to carry Jessica to Fort Frolic’s bathysphere station, call her absence in to her job - a service for which she’d only thanked him a day later by insisting he stay with her for the time being.

“Does he know where you live?” she’d fired at him when he made a move to stand up and leave.

“What?”

“Alex.” Jessica’s eyes narrowed skeptically. “Does he know where you live?”

Jay shifted his weight and regarded her uncertainly.

“Not, not _specifically_ but - ”

“Then you’re staying here.”

Her tone had brooked no argument, not that Jay had been feeling particularly argumentative. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Maybe she’d have changed her mind if she saw the hypos he’d slipped into his pocket. Or maybe she would’ve demanded some for herself. It would fix her up quick, he knows that much. Nothing like the ping of ADAM entering your system, knitting flesh together, shooting your blood through with bolts of lightning. You can lift heaven and earth. Forget Atlas, you really _are_ Atlas and the world’s under your thrall. You can do anything.

Six days later and she still walks with a limp and has to pause every so often to shake her head, rub at the back of her neck, squint at empty air as though reaffirming her own existence. Maybe she’s concussed. Maybe nothing can fix her.

Maybe he should’ve offered -

Maybe she would’ve refused -

Maybe she would’ve kicked him out -

Alex is still out there, deranged and sick with ADAM and out of his mind -

_Let him come._ He has the ADAM now.

And Alex has a head start, spliced up to hell in time for Cohen to get his fingers into him.

So Jay can’t think too hard on these things right now. He’s got to stay focused. He’s got to remember what he needs, what they all need.

He curls his fingers around his hidden trove, the hypos and vials carefully kept concealed in his rolled-up jacket, stashed in the corner of the room Jessica gracefully deemed ‘his’. It’s better this way. Safer. Jessica’s proven handy in a pinch, but he can’t trust that he’s anything to her but a means to an end. She wants to track Kralie down. Pin him, corner him, make him tell them what his _problem_ is, why he acted the way he did. He’d been downright skittish when Jessica had dragged him into that confrontation, uncharacteristically jumpy and nervous and overly evasive.

Jay doesn’t blame her.

He’s scanned the headlines. He’s kept his ears open for any mention of Kralie in the papers, in the public announcement systems, anything. He’s not exactly high-profile, but he’s well-known enough in Cohen’s circle to have a decent following, right?

He’s got enough people who care about him, right?

Right?

But there’s nothing in the _Tribune_ but a line or two about a possible break in at the Cameron Suites, but since no one there invested in Ryan Security, there’d been no continuing the investigation beyond the obvious.

“Don’t you have a job to go to?” says Jessica, arching a brow as she pauses with her hand on the knob.

“Not anymore,” Jay says dully.

_“You look like shit,” said Espinoza._

_“Gee,” said Jay, dryly, “thanks.”_

_“I do my best.” He snapped the paper up again, that flimsy partition of ink and paper to divide them. Jay rubbed at the crook of his elbow, sliding in behind the counter. The place looked empty. Just like always._

_“You all right there?” Espinoza peered out from behind the paper, regarding Jay speculatively._

_“I’m fine.”_

_“Uh-huh.”_

_Jay dropped his hands and braced them against the counter, prompting a sharp intake of breath from his boss._

_“Jesus - ”_

_“What?” He glanced sidelong at Espinoza, watching the alarm flicker across the other man’s features. Then one of his big, meaty hands closed into a fist and banged across the counter._

_“Out,” he said, jabbing a finger fiercely at the door. “Get out.”_

_“Wh - I don’t, I don’t understand - ”_

_“This?” He seized one of Jay’s scrawny arms in hand and shook it emphatically. Jay twisted, struggling to kick out of the bigger man’s grip, but to no avail. The needlemarks were stark and cleanly visible, splotching and pocking the pale skin of his elbow. “This is why I don’t take job applications from freakin’_ junkies.” __

_“I’m not - I’m not a - ”_

_“Don’t lie to me, boy,” growled Espinoza. “You been gone three days and I hear nothing from you, complete radio silence, and you come back in like nothing’s happened? I can overlook that. Hell, I can even understand it. But that - ” He gestured wildly at the peppering of reddish welts on his forearm. “You don’t come in here spliced all to hell. Got it? You just don’t. That’s a one way ticket to pure crazy, you hear me?”_

_“I’m not - ” The protest dried in Jay’s throat. “It’s not so bad, really, I just needed - ”_

_“I don’t care,” snapped Espinoza. “Come back when you’re clean, and not before. I’ll be damned if I let one of you spliced-up fuckers wreck the only business I got. We clear?”_

Jessica shrugs, and slips out the door. Jay counts, slowly, two minutes after the door creaks quietly shut behind her. Three minutes. Four minutes. Five.

He releases a breath in a slow, ponderous exhale and scrambles over to his tightly-wadded jacket, extricating a fresh vial of ADAM from the folds. He shakes it experimentally. The thick, glutinous liquid sloshes faintly, deliciously inside.

He reads the worn label, squinting at faded text.

_**SECURITY BULLSEYE** _

_Are those pesky Security Cameras getting you down? Simply tag your enemies with our photoelectric insects and those cameras and Turrets become your best friend. Splice Security Bullseye today!_

Jay grimaces and flexes his wrist unconsciously. Always with the goddamn insects.

But it’ll serve his purposes well enough, for now. He unstoppers the bottle, inserts the needle, and begins withdrawing the vial’s precious contents.

\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**FORT FROLIC - December 1st, 1958**

The rush hasn’t worn away by the time he clambers out of the bathysphere and winds his way through the station, but the typical crowded nature of the Fort doesn’t seem to be as overwhelmingly present today. The bustling walkways have been whittled down to a hopeful trickle, quiet enough for Jay to even hear the rattling jingle of the slot machines and card games over at Sir Prize.

No yellow tape, no police barricades. Guess Kralie never invested in any of those automated security systems most of Rapture’s citizens are encouraged to use these days. And seeing as he wasn’t high enough on Cohen’s ladder of lunatic disciples, it grants Jay plenty of time to sleuth around the area, see if he can glean a clue of where Alex went. Maybe, if he could just _talk_ to him without Jessica around - it’s not that he doesn’t like her or that he isn’t grateful, because he is, really, honestly, truly, but she was just so - _confrontational_ that day and it hadn’t done anything to put Alex at ease. Jay’s safer. He’s familiar. He can ease into things.

The door is half-hanging on its hinges when he gets there. The rest of the hall is silent.

He slips silently inside, darting a glance over his shoulder to ensure no one’s watching. There’s no guarantee anyone would care if that were the case, but he has to make sure this time. He seems to end up jumped, beaten, or otherwise painfully inconvenienced every time he visits this place.

The place is still in the state of haphazard disarray it was in when he left it. Jay only hesitates a moment before making a beeline for the half-shattered dresser. He combs through discarded and dust-coated shirts, turning each one over with the hope of glimpsing a glowing sliver of red or blue.

He curses under his breath and tosses the useless torn cloth aside when his search turns up nothing. The ADAM he took must have been the last Alex had on him, or someone else came along before he did and had the same idea. It’s been almost a week since the incident. It’s more than a little reasonable, especially given Cohen’s propensity to encourage splicing in his followers until they’re gone beyond all recognition. That other guy, the one who was here before, Fitzpatrick - it’s also not unreasonable to assume he’d’ve gone through this place before Jay even thought to.

Jay sinks onto the four-poster bed. The mattress sags, and something beneath creaks as the finely varnished wood threatens to crack. He winces. Either he or Jessica must’ve gotten thrown in that direction.

A camera is still perched on top of Alex’s desk, and he retrieves it. It’s a fine model, well-maintained, bulky and heavy in his hands but beautiful in its own right. He runs his thumb around the curve of the frame, the contours of the shape withs its graceful arcs and vertices.

_“Brand new start under the sea,” said Alex, watching the newspaper boys across the street hiss out plumes of smoke during their five minutes of downtime. “Sounds stupid, I know. But what d’you say?”_

_He looked at Jay, detached and sidelong but curious, and something about the way he’d thought of Jay at all in making the decision, trusted him enough to tell him, made up Jay’s mind at once._

_“I’d be for it,” he said._

_Alex nodded, satisfied, and pushed away from the brick building he’d leaned himself up against. He tossed Jay a vague half-grin over his shoulder._

_“Then I’ll see you when the world ends.”_

“Goddamnit, not _you_ again.”

Jay jumps, thumps his head against the bed’s upper beam, and this time he _definitely_ hears a crack. He rubs furiously at the top of his head, glaring at the shape of Fitzpatrick poised in the open doorway.

“I didn’t see a line to get in,” snaps Jay, “did you?”

“No.” Fitzpatrick doesn’t even grace him with a cool look. He simply enters the room with a cigarette between his lips and a hat pulled down over his eyes. “But I don’t think Mr. Kralie would appreciate you going through his belongings.”

Jay makes a point of setting the camera down. He folds his arms.

“I’m not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m not here for his ADAM, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Because there isn’t any. Not anymore. Jay’s stomach twinges at the lie.

“No, I know you’re not.” Fitzpatrick shrugs one shoulder and clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I already cleaned this place out once I heard.”

“Son of a bitch.” Jay jolts to his feet, hands balling into fists in indignation. “And you’re getting on _my_ case about stealing?”

“Wasn’t stealing,” says Fitzpatrick. “Call it a loan. He owed me.”

“Sure he did,” Jay scoffs. “So why’re you here now?”

“To keep people like _you_ out. Speaking of which.” Fitzpatrick jabs a finger at the door. He still won’t so much as look at Jay. It grates. Is he just too high-profile for the likes of lowly little Merrick? Is that it?

Wouldn’t be a goddamn surprise.

Jay snorts. “Keeping tabs on the place now, are you?”

“You could say that.” He snaps his fingers, re-emphasizing the direction of his finger. “Now get the hell out.”

“What gives you the - ”

He never gets the chance to complete the sentence. Fitzpatrick dissipates into a burst of hot red cinders, then rematerializes with his hands fisted into the front of Jay’s jacket.

“I’m not gonna repeat myself,” says Fitzpatrick, low and controlled. “This is my - _friend’s_ apartment you’re ransacking. I say out, that means you _get_ out.”

He lifts his head so the shadow of his hat’s brim can no longer obscure his face. Jay manages to turn a yelp of alarm into a wordless noise of disgust as he squirms in Fitzpatrick’s hard grip.

One side of the man’s face looks swollen, distended beyond recognition, the skin made spongy and soft. His left eye isn’t even visible anymore, like the skin on his forehead spilled over and simply succumbed to the downward pull of gravity. A latticework of spidery blue capillaries line the cancerous lumps of flesh that cling to his face, thickly clustered and tumorous, pulling the left side of his mouth downward into a permanent scowl, baring his teeth, exposing the too-slick, too-red gums of his lower jaw. His single eye fixes on Jay furiously, shot through with red veins as it glowers at him.

Jay nods once, breathlessly, and makes good on the order.

He gets all the way to the bathysphere station before he reaches into the folds of his jacket and retrieves Alex’s camera, and with it a fat brown envelope. It hadn’t been easy to smuggle them out of the apartment, but Fitzpatrick had been a bit distracted at the time.

Jay allows himself a small, tight, satisfied smile.

Those photoelectric insects really do draw the attention of every security camera and bot in the area.


	14. [ we're all just creatures of ]

**ARTEMIS SUITES - December 3, 1958**  
  
The place isn’t built for two people, and that had been part of the deal in the first place; not _needing_ to deal with everyone else clamoring over her things, not needing to accommodate other tenants, not having to make constant compromises about whose space is whose. The corner suite, for all the hiked up pricing, was more than worth the price for that benefit alone. _Was_ , because, as luck would have it, Jessica isn’t the only one living in it. Not with Jay taking a patch of floor, not with her paying extra for a spare set of sheets so he doesn’t catch his death of a cold, not with the way his teeth chatter loud enough to keep them both up all night. She can’t _blame_ him for that, exactly. He bought the rhetoric Ryan sold him, hook, line, and sinker, just like the rest of them did. Just like all the other fools that live in Artemis with them.  
  
The problem is that he _kept_ buying it, and got himself spliced up all to hell. Maybe to prove a point to Alex, or to adapt to the world beneath sea, or in a last-ditch attempt to purchase some sense of meaning for himself.  
  
The fact that she’s not yet cast him onto the streets, left him to Alex’s mercy, has begun to rankle at her. She’s smarter than that. She’s smarter than how she ended up several days prior, hair matted to the side of her head, dark and stiff with her own blood, skull nearly cracked thanks to a poor choice on her part. If Kralie wasn’t headed down a dark and ruinous path before, that was all the confirmation she needed to know that he is _now_. No better than the splicers that climb the walls and gibber on and on about seeing ghosts, desperate for their next fix, for a clear shot of the crystalline red.  
  
Assuming he hasn’t reached that point already. The most she could do, given everything, was lie low. Lie low and hold still until the ringing in her head ceased, the migraines that continue pound at the interior of her skull ever since she collided with the wall of Kralie’s apartment in a startling impact of flesh on wood.  
  
The morning finds her hunched over one of the eye-washing stations, teeth gritted as she rides one such migraine out. One of these days, it feels like, she’s going to end up putting a hand to her temple and feel things _moving_ there that shouldn’t be moving, bone grating on bone. Like she’s about to come apart at the seams at any second. Like she’s about to start to fray into scum-colored threads, thick with seawater and heavy with salt. Eyes flicking up to the mirror, she traces the edges of her reflection, everything from the disheveled slump of her shoulders to the hollows beneath her eyes to the thinness of her cheeks.  
  
If the Medical Pavilion specialized in genuine care, she would’ve stopped there already. Nowadays, though - with the ADAM serving as an easy fix, a one-size-fits-all treatment, most of the care she’d be liable to get there would be nothing more than some plastic smoothing of her cheeks, the removal of a lump or two in the face thanks to overuse and abuse of a miracle drug.  
  
With no alternate markets, that leaves her to wrestle with what might be a serious head injury, possibly even a concussion, in the privacy of her own home. ADAM is for the desperate and the adventurous, and at the moment, Jessica is neither. With any luck, she never _will_ be.  
  
But all the same, she has to go in today. If she keeps calling in sick - well, it’s a wonder she’s not been let go already. She’s already more trouble than she’s worth, barely reaching the point of brilliance that would allow her the _privilege_ of working alongside men less qualified. To get anywhere, in Rapture, you can’t simply be decent at your job, particularly if you happen to be a woman - you must be _exceptional_.  
  
The employee number that defines Jessica Locke barely makes that cut, and if she loses the job, she loses the apartment. She loses everything else. Alex and his splicing, Tim and his memory loss, Jay and his desperate, floundering attempts to ascribe some sort of meaning to his life via plasmids or memories or promises or other people. A trio of men who’ve ended up mired up in her world, for better or for worse.  
  
Jessica pushes away from the station, dragging a hand through her hair as she starts to scrape it back by the fistful, tying it back in a sloppy ponytail. Straggles cling to a forehead slicked with cold sweat, but it hardly matters; she doesn’t enter the workman’s world to look pretty.  
  
And in any case, Rubert is probably pulling double shifts without her. And at that rate, his back is going to give out any day now.  
  


\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

  
**NEPTUNE’S BOUNTY - DECEMBER 3, 1958**  
  
As it happens, Jessica still has a job, and Rubert still has a working back. He’d seemed appropriately delighted with her impromptu return, face splitting into a toothy grin that would have to make up for the hug she refused to let him go in for.  
  
“Weren’t sure when you were coming back,” he says happily. The sincerity to his tone, if unexpected, elicits a faint, bewildered smile - a startled quirk of the lips on her part.  
  
“Well, I’m here now,” says Jessica, smoothly. “And Rapture’s pipes need thawing and maintenance.”  
  
“Do they ever.” Rubert shakes his head, grimacing. “It’s like nobody here’s ever heard of a damn furnace! But I’ll let you in on something, if you like.”  
  
Jessica tilts her head, intrigued despite herself, leaning in as his tone drops to a stage whisper. Rubert glances to either side in an exaggerated sweep, as though afraid he might be singled out, and then, with a snap of his fingers, lights up a small tongue of fire at the tip of his thumb.  
  
“There!” The stilling flame throws his features into shadowy relief, the sharp scent of smoke laying over that of the wet wood and fish guts of Neptune’s Bounty. “Got me one of them _plasmids_. Done a _wonder_ of good for my back on top of it!”  
  
The smile she would have forced on his behalf wavers, and Jessica can manage little more than a soft, strangled sound in the back of her throat that might have once been a quiet “congratulations.” Her chin jerks in a nod, but she’s already shuffling back, and away.   
  
“No more arthritis!” Rubert is cackling, but Jessica’s got her shoulders squared and her head bowed, heart hammering in the pit of her chest. More and more of the scant number of people she gives a damn about are giving themselves over to the ADAM, to the lure of that miracle drug that sends all the pain away. The splicers aren’t a big enough reason to steer clear from the stuff, it seems. Not anymore.  
  
She doesn’t have to look back to hear the dejected note in her colleague’s tone, to picture the way he watches her go, crestfallen. A betrayal of interest, and a lack of excitement on his behalf when he has so little else to look forward to these days.  
  
“I thought it were plenty exciting,” mumbles Rubert, quietly defensive. Jessica doesn’t have an answer.  
  
They’ve only just begun to clear away the glittering array of ice crystals that have begun to accumulate around the edges of the pipes in one of Fontaine’s old fisheries when the squeal of metal and the creak of wood beneath a heavy tread sets her heart contracting in a painful spasm. One of those things, the diving suit-clad protectors of the children that wander, barefoot and whisper-voiced, eyes smoldering like a pair of sparking embers, rounds the corner, the yellow glare of its helmet’s lights unmistakable.  
  
“Back,” says Jessica, quietly, but Rubert has already begun to shift back, a protective arm splayed out in front of her.  
  
“We’re alone down here, girl.” He nods in the Big Daddy’s direction, and closer inspection reveals that he’s correct: either the thing has turned in its tiny charge for the day, or it’s on its way to pick one up. Either way, Jessica has to swallow the bitterness under her tongue, the wet-wrung towel that’s begun her intestinal tract. There’s no denying the sour taste of her own sweat and fear as the tin daddy rumbles past; engineered, no doubt, another product of Ryan’s ingenious manufacturing, because the idea that something could be _in_ there, alive and aware, is - is -   
  
A fresh drag of phantom nails down the back of her skull, and Jessica flinches. The muscles in her throat work silently for several moments before she can form the words, even if they emerge as little more than a ragged croak:  
  
“The pipes.”  
  
Rubert’s look prickles uncertainly at her as he follows, unwilling as she is to turn her back on the daddy as it treks along with its slow, ponderous gait.  
  
“You all right there, girl?” he ventures, hunkering down beside her.  
  
Her teeth bite into the wall of her cheek, an impulse that does nothing to quiet the subtle tremor in her hands as she works.  
  
“Fine,” says Jessica. The lie is as unconvincing as it is breathless, and Rubert’s expression only darkens with obvious concern.  
  
“Jess - "  
  
“I’m fine.” The firmer quality of the words don’t quite match the pale wash of her features, her face as bloodless and blanched as bone. “Please. Please, let’s just - finish this.”  
  
Rubert holds her gaze for what feels like several minutes. Finally, he relents with a low, tired sigh.  
  
“If you say so, girl,” he says softly. “If you say so.”  
  
The burning unrest that’s shadowed her since the incident in Kralie’s apartment never truly departed, but the sight of the daddy lumbering about in Neptune’s Bounty, for whatever reason, re-ignited those dying coals, breathed a fresh life into them. The tremble in her step, the hunch to her shoulders, the restive twitch to her fingertips, have become, once again, inescapable in their uniformity. An inability to sit still, a needling jitter to the back of her neck that has her glancing over her shoulder every minute, every other minute. The idea that something could be watching, that something could be lingering in the pit of her shadow, claws at any pretense of calm. Skeletal outlines of trees imprinted on the walls of her mind, crooked as lightning bolts. A pair of eyes set so deep into a blank canvas that they don’t need to be there to see, to pierce her with a leucotome that chilled her to the marrow.  
  
The sight of the daddy had reinvigorated the old ghosts of those sensations, but they’d - they’d _been_ there, hadn’t they? They’d been there always. Since Rapture, and before. But there was no reason behind it, no discernible etiology to the illogical leap her mind took; if anything, the squat, metallic figure was the polar opposite of the rake-thin specter that haunted her childhood nightmares.  
  
So why…?  
  
Their work in Neptune’s Bounty takes up most of the shift, a fact for which Jessica can be, if obliquely, grateful. It entails a minimum of traversing the city, and thus a minimum of potential contact with more of the daddies and their waifish gatherers that slip about, barefoot and ragged, behind them. The idea of seeing another of them, today, squeezes at her stomach with some nameless, unendurable dread, something to which she cannot put a name. Nor does she care to.  
  
“Old McDonagh’s,” says Rubert, with a long-suffering sigh and a rueful roll of his shoulders. “You ever been ’round there?”  
  
Jessica, teeth worrying at her bottom lip, regards the sign to the place without seeing it, the flecks of paint imprinted on the worn, salt-soaked wood all but invisible. The fog induced by the daddy’s initial appearance has proven difficult to shrug away, for reasons beyond her conceptualization.  
  
“Oi,” says Rubert, louder. Jessica jerks, wide eyes darting his way. “You hearin’ me, girl?”  
  
“What?” says Jessica, then, “no. I mean, yes. I’m fine.”  
  
Rubert purses his lips with a thin, almost prim sort of disapproval, shaking his head. He clicks his fingers, pointing at her sharply.  
  
“See, now,” he says flatly, wagging his finger, “I know what’s going on here, see.”  
  
Jessica blanches, feet rooted to the spot.  
  
“What _you_ need is a _drink.”_ Rubert shoots her another ragged grin. “McDonagh’s, well - it’ll get you sick and plastered in less than an hour. Place don’t look like much, but a scotch on the rocks’ll get whatever’s in your system _outta_ your system.”  
  
“No.” Her response is immediate, a hard jolt of sound that’s jarred from her throat before she can register why it is she’s saying it.  
  
“It’s cheap, it’s fine, it’ll do you good,” Rubert is saying stubbornly, seemingly impervious to the firmness of her denial.  
  
“Rubert,” says Jessica.  
  
“I’ll _cover_ it, if that’s what you’re so worried about.”  
  
 _“Rubert.”_ Something of the desperation in her tone must have finally gotten through to him; her co-worker stills, eyeing her quizzically.  
  
Jessica forces a wan smile, her expression shadowed.  
  
“I just...need some time. To myself.”  
  
Rubert regards her in silence for a moment - for several. When he finally nods, it’s with a weary grin that doesn’t quite bely the worry in his eyes. The fact that he cares that much for the quality of her well-being means, perhaps, more than Jessica can put words to. More than she cares to admit to him, or to anyone else. It’s always safer, not knowing. Safer, not _caring_. That’s the Rapture way. Or perhaps it was always her way, and that was why Rapture so appealed to her.  
  
It doesn’t matter, at any rate.  
  
It takes several more minutes of cajoling, pleading, and gentle if firm insistences to send Rubert along his way at the conclusion of their joint shift, and even then it’s only with the compromise that he sign her off the clock so she can head straight home and get, in his words, “a bit of real shut-eye. You look like a _mess_ , girl.”  
  
Reluctantly, she’d agreed. For all the complete civilian acceptance of the Ryanist policy of pulling one’s own weight, she would have to admit to herself that, in the end, one would be hard-pressed to find someone who genuinely believed every word of that manifesto in earnest. Most people make their own philosophies, profiting off one another, and in the end, is that not its own form of interdependency?  
  
It speaks to her absolute dearth of mental energy that Jessica finds the thought vaguely amusing. So amusing that, when her foot catches on something, she nearly crashes to the ground. It’s only thanks to pure instinct that she manages to catch herself on the edge of a barrel, fingers clinging to roughened wood as she staggers.  
  
Then she glances down, and her heart plummets into her stomach.  
  
“Tim!” hisses Jessica, dropping swiftly into a crouch. “Oh my god, _Tim.”_  
  
Tim doesn’t respond, sprawled on his side, sweat greasing his hair to his forehead and the nape of his neck. The back of one hand to his forehead has Jessica recoiling from the sickly heat practically emanating from his skin with a startled hiss between her teeth. A careful shake of his shoulder, and then another, yields nothing; whatever’s happened to him, it’s rendered him well and truly out cold.  
  
And it’s not like Rapture Security will give a damn. She could _call_ them, but what the hell would _that_ accomplish? It’s not as if she could pay them to care, pay them to give a damn about - whatever could lay Tim out like that. The man’s built sturdier than anyone she’s known. If it weren’t for the rattling cough that seemed to shake him from head to toe, it’d be easy to imagine that nothing could floor him so easily.   
  
Is _this_ what happens when he can’t remember?  
  
Some creep gone plasmid-happy, the same way Alex has, wiping his mind clean and using Tim to their own ends? Who would do that? And _why?_ What makes Tim so special? No, that wouldn’t cover it at all, not when it’s not been a one-time thing, not for him. The way he talked about it, this has been a problem long before Rapture.  
  
So what, then? How’s he lasted down here, if it’s really been this bad?  
  
Sitting her and silently speculating won’t accomplish anything. Jessica groans, hooking one arm beneath Tim’s armpit as she tries to drag him to his feet, but he’s an utter deadweight. The most she can manage is to roll him onto his back. A pair of fingers held beneath his nose confirm that he’s breathing, albeit shallowly, but it’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough.  
  
McDonagh’s isn’t far. It isn’t far at all. Surely inside there are people who’d care enough to lend a hand.   
  
The blood rushes to her head in a dizzying roar when Jessica stands, a fresh headache pulsing at her temples. She weathers it silently, with gritted teeth and a stiff back, clutching at crates of fish packed with ice and salt and the rusted tin edges of garbage cans as she levers herself to her feet despite the fluxing pressure that grinds at her skull. If she can get to McDonagh’s, find someone inside who can help, who isn’t still recovering from an unidentified head injury and has more muscle than one wiry woman who’s worked on pipes too long - Tim deserves that much, at least. He deserves to be scraped up off the ground rather than left there to rot and be trod under the working man’s heel, no matter what Ryan says.  
  
She’s barely made it two steps when the silence gives way to a low groan and a hitching, rattling series of wet coughs. Tim sweeps one clammy hand over his mouth in a movement that’s just as uncoordinated as it is dazed, eyes fluttering as he comes to.  
  
“Shit,” says Jessica, dropping to his side.   
  
“Who’s - ” starts Tim, only for his chest to seize in another coughing fit. Jessica works one hand beneath his deltoid, attempting to boost him upward into a sitting position, but he flinches away, quivering.  
  
“Sit _up,_ dumbass,” she hisses. The ringing in her ears isn’t exactly doing wonders for her patience, and neither is the hollow ache in her skull. “Do you want to drown in your own sick?”  
  
Either it’s her tone or her words that gets across to Tim, because he blinks at her without recognition for several moments before he finally allows her to support him as he hauls himself clumsily upward, swaying slightly. At least there’s plenty of barrels for support, because the man looks about as well as one of the dead fish lying open-mouthed and glassy-eyed among the ice crystals and sea salt.  
  
“Alex,” says Tim, the word a listless mumble. His gaze rakes across the surrounding area, the water-darkened wood, the oily black streaks across the planks beneath his feet, before lighting on Jessica.  
  
Her stomach drops to her toes.  
  
“Alex?”  
  
Her head spins in the wake of the dizzying, staggered realization. He knows Alex. He _knows_ him - maybe very well. Maybe very, _very_ well. And maybe Alex - maybe he’s done this before. Maybe he’s done this to people besides Jessica, besides _Jay_.   
  
Maybe Tim was the first.  
  
“Kralie?” she presses in a mingled burst of eagerness and disbelief. “Alex _Kralie?”_  
  
Tim stares at her flatly, uncomprehending.  
  
“He was just here…” One hand comes sharply up to press at the side of his head as his brow creases in apparent discomfort, like he’s trying to remember. “Said he’d...he said he saw it. He saw it. No one’s supposed to see it.”  
  
“It?” Something cold trembles along the length of her spine, as though someone cracked an egg in her hair and left the yolk to trickle wetly down. “What _it?”_  
  
“No eyes,” says Tim, his breath sticking in his throat, the words half-formed. “It just _watches,_ but it didn’t - it never has any _eyes.”_  
  
Jessica stiffens.  
  
No. No.  
  
That’s not - possible. That thing from a nightmare, it’s only ever been just that: a nightmare. A belated realization. A thought on the tip of one’s tongue, never completed, never vocalized. Something long forgotten, because it was never anything more than a memory from childhood, distorted beyond recognition, a black slip of something wearing a suit. Peeping through the trees, the crooked black sticks of those trunks that stretched on into the sky forever, forever.  
  
“Wearing a suit?” The words are out before she can consider the wisdom of voicing them aloud, a sickening lurch curdling in her guts.  
  
Tim’s gaze snaps to her, sharpening up appreciably.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Did it - ” Her throat works soundlessly for a moment before she can force herself to continue. “Did it look like it was wearing a suit?”  
  
“You’ve seen it?”  
  
There’s no question about it. That’s terror flaring in Tim’s eyes, a stunned revelation regarding what should and shouldn’t be possible. A glint of something that she hasn’t the wherewithal to detect, to pick out from the horror she knows is reflected in her own face.  
  
“Not since I was a kid,” she whispers. “Not since I was...a _kid.”_  
  
“They told me it wasn’t real.” Tim regards her with an odd intensity, brow furrowed. “They said it wasn’t _real_. Just hallucinations.”  
  
“A nightmare,” says Jessica. “I just thought it was a nightmare.”  
  
Tim’s throat contracts, his already colorless features paling further. He staggers, the back of one foot thumping against the wood of the stacked barrels, fingers digging up into the ridges of the ziggurat of crates for support.  
  
“It took him,” he says hoarsely. “Alex. It took Alex.”  
  
“What do you mean, it _took_ him?”  
  
“He was here. He was just here.” One hand darts out in a haphazard wave, as if that might lend some shape to his words. “And I wake up and he’s just - gone.”  
  
“So where is he now?” She can’t fully fight back the tremor in her tone, the desperation pitching her voice higher, thinner. “Where would it _take_ him?”  
  
From the look on Tim’s face, one of two things becomes starkly, sickeningly transparent: either he doesn’t have an answer, or -  
  
Or he does, and it’s one he never wants to acknowledge.


	15. [ that man is a ghost ]

**FONTAINE’S DEPARTMENT STORE - DECEMBER 10, 1958**  
  
The world bleeds color out from the seam along its center, a static-laced gash in the hole of reality. His vision tilts in a wild slurry of black and gray, until one brighter blur detaches itself from the shapeless mass to advance. Something with five points that gradually becomes a hand, outstretched, palm closing around his upper arm and pulling.  
  
“Easy there,” says a voice that manages to sound both too distant and too immediate. “Quite a spill you took there, boyo.”  
  
The owner of the voice possesses an accent he can’t put a name to, though something of it rings as vaguely familiar. He’d be certain if he encountered anyone of that _sort_ , though, wouldn’t he? He...would. He’d have to.  
  
Something won’t stop tapping, somewhere to the left of him. A mosquito’s buzz in his ear, a rattle of keratin.  
  
He twitches on the spot. The solidity of the ground beneath his shoulder blades, the heaviness to his legs, the wet cling of clothing to his back and thighs - each sensation creeps back with an infuriating slowness, as though he’s trying to think through a wall of television snow. Something needles at the marrow of his bones, a spider-crawl jittering down the lengths of each tendon and muscle. He can’t stop shivering. The muffled tapping sharpens in volume, and it occurs to him that it’s not tapping at all; it’s the chattering of his own teeth.  
  
It _loomed_ at him. He remembers.  
  
It leered out from the uniform dark like a specter of his own making, the sharp, clean lines of its suit outlining an impossibly thin frame. The white oval of its face without a face, regarding him with an indescribable malice. It looked him over, dispassionate. Assessing him. Appraising him. As though mentally sizing him up, comparing him to some invisible set of standards, its evaluation sweeping through him with an unmistakable grave-like chill.

It had watched. It had deduced - _something._  
  
Then it set him on fire.  
  
He’d arched his back. He’d screamed, he’s sure of it. His throat still feels raw, as though his vocal cords had torn and started to bleed. The phantom sensation of an unholy blaze creeping down his spine, the astute sensation of being unraveled and reraveled, like the whole of him was being scrutinized and unmade and a ragged _piece_ of him had been excised, neurons screaming in a muffled outcry, a soundless scream of dying cells, and then - _then_ -  
  
Then, nothing.  
  
Then, he’s here.  
  
Someone’s hand cups at the small of his back, helping him sit upright. A rasp of noise escapes his throat, scratched and dull, his tongue too swollen from coughing or thirst to form anything coherent. The muscles in his throat contract in a swallow, and the parched burn confirms the latter.  
  
And then another burn, seeded deep in the pit of his belly. He rolls over and the hot slick of bile in the back of his throat gives way to the loud retch, the tumbling of brine and seawater and stomach acid across the floor already wet with water.  
  
“Oh, _disgusting!”_ says a high, haughty voice; a splicer, female.  
  
“Can it,” snaps the first voice with its lilting accent. “Boy’s still gettin’ his bearings. Give him a second, will you?”  
  
A spindly silhouette crooks by, built of too many angles and too thin a neck. He flinches at the sight of it, a bolt of something primal and terrified juddering in his heart before it occurs to him that it’s little more than another splicer, curved fishhooks dangling at its side, one corner of its face sagging and splotched with tumors as it lopes away with a singsong grumble.  
  
Alex groans, grasping at the proffered hand for support as he hauls himself upright. He wobbles precariously on the spot on jellied legs as he fights back the urge to once again decorate the floor with the contents of his stomach.  
  
“Steady now.” The first man again, this time clapping a sturdy hand to his shoulder. The features that swim in and out of obscurity gradually sharpen into a sharply defined jaw, an unshaven face, dark hair falling in coiled disarray across his forehead. Something about the shape of the man’s face, the set of his shoulders, again prickles at the back of his mind, as if maybe he should recognize him in some manner. _Should_ he?  
  
His rescuer's eyebrows lift in a slow, inquisitive creep.  
  
“You all right, there, boyo?”  
  
Alex nods, throat too dry to manage a verbal response. The man chuckles, his grip tightening briefly across his shoulder before he shifts back, slow and careful, ensuring Alex can stand on his own before giving him the requisite space.  
  
“Pretty far from it, looks like.” One corner of his mouth twitches up in a dry smile. “Could’a sworn I seen you somewhere before. Haven’t I?”  
  
Alex attempts to rasp out a reply, and the words immediately stick in his esophagus, prompting another coughing fit. Christ, by everything feels off, head spinning in a sickening tugging and pulling at the nausea pitting in his guts, the air stinking with the soup of vomit and acid and seawater and salt.  
  
The man signals to one of the splicers at his side. The exchange flurries past the scope of his insight, but the splicer departs promptly, skittering up along the wall with the hiss of crumbling stone and raining dust.  
  
“Looks to me like you’re up a creek without a canoe or any ADAM to steer you a way home.” He breaks away to glance back his ways as Alex straightens, shoulders jerking from the strain, the pressure, the _itch_ boiling in his chest. “‘Fraid we can’t help you there - we’re all but clean out down here, see.”  
  
_Down here - ?_  
  
Alex regards his savior blankly before managing the first word he’s spoken since waking.  
  
“What…?”  
  
The man chuckles without a hint of genuine mirth, tipping his head back as he inhales, blowing his breath out in a long, weary sigh.  
  
“I’m Atlas,” he says, without further preamble. “And welcome to Fontaine’s Department Store. Only place we got to call home.”  
  


\- ☞ ⚓ ☜ -

**FONTAINE’S DEPARTMENT STORE - DECEMBER 11, 1958**  
  
The world beneath Rapture is even darker and drearier than the most secluded, unwanted corners of the city proper. The dappling sunlight has more difficulty penetrating the perpetual gloom, occasionally stabbing through flabby mats of kelp in cloudy streams of benthic light. Here and again a sluglike creature tinted in a rich, unmistakable red oozes along the glass, leaving a pinkish trail in its wake. It'd be easy, were the thick panes of glass not separating his fingers from the cold sea floor, to reach out and touch it, gather it, hold it close to himself. Bathe himself in its warming light, its ambrosiac scent.

He watches it sulk past, beyond his conceivable touch, beyond his sight.

Atlas’s apparent demise wasn’t in the papers, or at least any papers Alex himself had read; the revolutionary had found himself on the wrong end of the Rapture Central Council and Ryan’s inner circle, confined to a prison sentence in the remnants of one of Fontaine’s old business establishments, detached and sunk away from the rest of the city, out of sight and out of mind the same way the man himself is. Or is meant to be.  
  
Even if Alex's face isn't bold enough, memorable enough, to be obvious to the general public, there’s no concealing the fine cut of his clothing, the scabs chapping his forearms that marks him as subject to ADAM’s deteriorative properties. Plenty of the splicers under Atlas’s beck and call look far worse off than a few bleeding sores and a lump or two in the face, but the look of them _now_ is -  
  
He doesn’t want to look at them. He doesn’t need the reminder of what he is, what he has the capacity to become. Or of something else, something dark and wisp-like that burns at the backs of his lids like a ghastly brand. Something thin that reached at him without hands, that had arms that extended, oozing from it, that touched into the core of his skull and _did_ something. Must have left something behind, some wet oil-slick _smear_ of itself, because he can’t stop shaking, can’t keep his teeth from chattering, can’t stop running his hands up and down the gooseflesh pocking his arms. It’s wet down here, cold and in poor maintenance without any repairmen or engineers to keep the place running. The splicers that might have been able to heat the pipes with the genetic burn in their palms have run out of the ADAM necessary a long time ago.  
  
“Magnetic mines keep anyone from gettin’ out,” says Atlas, indicating the distant red glare of their warning lights, dotted throughout the surrounding murk. “Or in.”  
  
He glances at Alex meaningfully.  
  
Alex stares at him, uncomprehending, until the other man adjusts his weight, sucking on the wall of his cheek as he contemplates him. A day or so to recuperate had been, evidently, all Atlas and his bandits were willing to allow him, even if Alex's legs still tremble when he stands, even when his heart feels as though it's groaning against the confines of his chest.

To some extent, perhaps he can't blame him for that.  
  
“Except you, boyo.”  
  
A shiver races from neck to toes, and Atlas’s gaze is abruptly, inexplicably intolerable to look at. Too sharp, too piercing, too insufferably incisive. He’d heard of the man’s revolution, sure, but what was there to it, other than one of Ryan’s “parasites” trying to stir the kettle and harness the rage of the lower class nobodies? Rapture _lives_ , well and truly, above the abandoned remnants of Fontaine’s failed businesses. It breathes and teems with people who work and play and love and create, like Cohen’s students, like the doctors who run the Medical Pavilion. No one has to fear the censor. No one has to fear restrictions from the law, from anything but their own failure of imagination. If no one’s been able to drag themselves to their feet and truly master Rapture’s opportunities, that’s their own fault, isn’t it? Even Merrick hadn’t come to Alex for answers, _really_ , had he? He’d come for a freebie, to _mooch_ off of Alex’s hard-earned dime.  
  
Something sputters at the tips of his thumbs, and he has to ball his fingers into fists, an impulsive jerk of muscle he’s certain Atlas doesn’t miss.  
  
He doesn’t miss much.  
  
“I don’t,” says Alex, but the words flounder, incomplete, the rest of his sentence dying before it’s even been properly conceived.  
  
“You don’t have to lie to me, son,” says Atlas, quietly. “One look at you, and I know all I need to. You’ve lived nice and fine up until now, haven’t you? Probably got yourself a nice place in Artemis, a pretty little apartment where you don’t need to answer to anyone but yourself.”  
  
The reflexive urge to shake his head numbly seizes at him, but he muzzles it, wrestles it into silence. If he denies it, it’ll just raise more questions. Let Atlas draw his own conclusions. See what he _wants_.  
  
“Might’ve been a high life for a while yet, but you’re here with us now.” Atlas folds his arms across his chest. He’s not a particularly large man, but the frame of him, the hard iron in his stance - the fucking _weight_ of his presence now is indescribable. The faceless caricatures plastered all over the lesser parts of Rapture were too simple to capture his features, but they certainly highlighted his aura, the commanding, reassuring look to him. If Alex were any one of the down-and-out parasites, the chumps, the unwanted and unlucky, doubtless he would have found him to be wholly alluring. Doubtless he _would_ have, if he were the target audience here.  
  
But Alex, he’s the last person who should be  now, standing in front of the enigmatic revolutionary that nearly destroyed Rapture from the ground up. This is the man for Merrick, for him and that woman he dragged along behind him to Alex’s place, and for any other working class schlubs who never got their big fucking break. Alex, he’s here because - because _why_ , exactly?  
  
Because _something_ saw fit to drop him here. Because he _remembers_ , he remembers he was in Neptune’s Bounty, back in what feels like an entire lifetime ago. He’d nearly set someone on fire, riddled with his own paranoia, with the plunging certainty in his stomach that it was _coming_ for him. And then, then it - it _found_ him, didn’t it?  
  
It...had to have.  
  
How else did he end up here?  
  
Plainly, Atlas has the same question on his lips. The searching look, the up-and-down scrutiny of every waterlogged inch of his newest accommodation says as much.  
  
And if he wants to be of any use to Atlas, he’s going to have to sell himself the same way he sold himself to Cohen. Signing himself up for public scrutiny yet again, ensuring that his talents will be used for some sort of higher end goal, ensuring his talents are of practical enough use that he not be discarded like a spent shell casing.  
  
What’s he got to offer, anyway? Assuming Atlas doesn’t recognize him - he’s willing to bank on the fact that he doesn’t, given the man’s working class persona would separate him from the movie-goer crowd, and thus separate him from those that would recognize Cohen’s artistic flairs if they stared him flat in the face - he can still tell when he’s talking to a member of the social elite, so to speak. He wouldn’t have lasted long down here if he couldn’t. And Alex, for all the stains and tears dotting his once fine clothing, is practically a poster boy for that very elite.  
  
The part of the social order whose establishment Atlas is doing his damnedest to destroy, brick by brick.  
  
So what do you do to sell yourself to a man like Atlas?  
  
His name’s popped up in a conflagration of smear campaigns, spearheaded by Cohen’s finest. He’s plastered across papers, across street signs, along walls and alleyways of the lesser districts. His name is blared in loudspeakers as a smooth-toned, anonymous female voice denounces his claims, lumping him in with all the other “parasites” that fail to appeal to the world Andrew Ryan built for himself beneath the sea.  
  
“Here’s what I’m having trouble getting, see.” Atlas’s tone is level, even, uninquisitive, but his stare is as sharp and inescapable as an orbitoclast beneath the eye. “How’s a man such as yourself end up several fathoms deeper and then some from where he’s supposed to be? Ain’t easy, gettin’ sent down here with the rest of us hoodlums.”  
  
It’s not, is it? It’s not very easy at all. The muscles in his throat work noiselessly as he strains to claw together some halfway-believable excuse, but Atlas is already talking on with a lazy certainty, as if he knows full well what Alex’s answer is going to be.  
  
He...can’t. He _can’t_. Can he?  
  
“We’d know if any bathyspheres ended up down here. ‘Specially if Ryan himself sent ‘em.”  
  
Because...right. Yes. Despite the surrounding minefield, they’d take any chance they could to get out of here, no doubt. To get back into the ideological fight, and re-engage in a battle of dust and gunpowder and plasmids.  
  
His veins are as dry as his mouth feels, and there’s going to be no help coming. Not with the way things are down here, rations doubtless stretched thin and counting, Atlas and his bandits and splicers doomed to scavenge through a dead man’s failed business for food, for money, for working vending machines, for anything that might keep them alive.  
  
No ADAM.  
  
Immediately, the itch scabs at the inside of his lungs, behind his eyelids, at the roof of his mouth. The hunger for it, for the sparking red to blaze through him in an ecstatic hum of nerves fraying and being rebound, is utterly beyond the telling of it. He drifts, nerveless, in an imagined daze of what it would be just to _taste_ it, only for a moment -  
  
“ - so what I need to know is,” Atlas continues amiably, dragging Alex from his reverie in a painful drone of something forced and polite, “what’s there to you that’s worth _keeping_ around, down here? ‘Cause forgive me if I’m wrong, but you don’t much seem like the sort we revolutionaries tend to attract.”  
  
A story, a story. Spin a story. Tell a tale. It’s what he prided himself on to start with, isn’t it? The ability to write something, write it _well_ , make it compelling. The words croak limply in his mouth to start with before he can formulate something, watching Atlas’s eyebrows creep, unimpressed, higher up his brow.  
  
“You’re right,” he says.  
  
The crease between Atlas’s brows deepens.  
  
It’s too faint. He has to clear his throat and try again, knowing better than to ask for water. Not when he’s just as liable to be deserving of little more than a bullet to the head, something no amount of ADAM can fix.  
  
“You’re right,” he says, louder. “I’m not...it was an accident. Me being here.”  
  
There’s the explanation. The bedrock, the justification. Now, expand upon it. You’ve established your lead: the underdog, the man who’s down and out and completely stripped of everything he once thought he had. Now he has to climb to the top again. Now you give him a reason to endure. A reason for the audience to root for him.  
  
He’s not out of the game yet. Not before the story even starts.  
  
“But,” says Alex, “that doesn’t mean I can’t _help_." Jesus, he sounds like  _Merrick._ "If we ever get out of here...I can get you access. To equipment, to...to all the ways you can make your revolution public. Printing presses. Cameras. More.”  
  
He doesn’t have to promise them anything. He can turn each and every one of them in, once he reaches Rapture properly again. Oaths may as well mean nothing to parasites and scavengers, right?  
  
“Access to what, exactly?” Atlas chuckles, sounding far from convinced. His head lists to one side, regarding Alex skeptically. “What reason do we got to believe you’ll hold yourself to that? All we got is the word of some washed-up cameraman, after all.”  
  
_Washed-up cameraman._  
  
He’d bristle, but there’s no part of him left to rail against the qualifier; every inch of him chills at the words, their unhurried pace, the sheer lack of bravado to their emergence.  
  
He knows him.  
  
He’s known him for, perhaps, this entire time. Waiting to see if Alex would dig himself in deeper. He’s _lucky_ , honestly, that Atlas chose now of all times to play that final ace up his sleeve and lay Alex bare to the world. And he’s even luckier that he didn’t do it in front of a herd of furious, ADAM-dry splicers.  
  
So why _didn’t_ he?  
  
“Now,” says Atlas, one hand raking idly along the weeks-old shadow chasing the line of his jaw. “I  can’t say I’m personally averse to the notion of cutting a deal. Seeing as you just dropped on in, I’d say there’s a fair bet that means there’s a way out of here.”  
  
There’s one answer. Raising false hope, raising questions that might subtly undercut Atlas’s authority - that’d be unwise, even for someone with as much charismatic sway as he’s purported to.  
  
Alex tries not to grimace. Envying Kyle and his ability to snap from place to place with a seamless, sucking snap of displacing molecules.  
  
He’s not a mechanic. Christ, he’s not even _remotely_ good with machines. He’s a cameraman, a disciple of Cohen’s, one of those lucky enough to have entered the chain of upward-climbers that dug their heels into the ziggurat surrounding the master of prolific artistry at the very top.  
  
The air between them thickens, ripe with discontent, with uncertainty, with any number of things Alex can’t or won’t put a name to, the air silent but for the soft drip of melting ice, the chill puffs of their breath warming the frigid air. No heating down here. Nothing but hoards of hungry splicers, the lumbering galoots that drag their massive drills alongside them, and their tiny, unlucky charges.  
  
“Well.” Atlas folds his arms, gaze drifting across Alex with a lazy indifference. “That just about gives me all the answers I need.”  
  
The breath chills in his lungs, seizing with a bright lurch of panic. Eyes widening, his head shaking fractionally. No, _no -_  
  
It wasn’t even his _fault_ he ended up down here like this -  
  
“If it’s any consolation,” says Atlas, calmly, advancing, “you can be grateful for one thing: today could’ve been your last birthday.”  
  
Whatever happens next blazes too brightly across his vision in sickening, linear streaks, the prelude to the breaking glissando that shreds along the slab of meat in his skull in shrieking, synaptic disharmony, the upward crawl of arpeggios breaking and diverting and routing and rerouting until they reach the highest point, their most unbearable pitch.  
  
A symphony, vast and black-inked and sprawling, broadening and shrilling in the chime of black and white keys.  
  
It would have been such a masterpiece.


End file.
